Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics 1604979461, 9781604979466

Citation preview

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

EDITED BY

Mabel Lee and Liu Jianmei      Cambria Sinophone World Series General Editor: Victor H. Mair

Copyright 2018 Cambria Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected], or mailed to: Cambria Press 100 Corporate Parkway, Suite 128 Amherst, New York 14226, USA. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lee, Mabel editor. | Liu, Jianmei, editor. Title: Gao Xingjian and transmedia aesthetics / edited by Mabel Lee and Liu Jianmei. Description: Amherst, New York : Cambria Press, 2018. | Series: Cambria Sinophone world series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018003597 | ISBN 9781604979466 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Gao, Xingjian--Aesthetics. | Aesthetics in literature. Classification: LCC PL2869.O128 Z734 2018 | DDC 895.12/52--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003597

Table of Contents

List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Chapter 1: Introduction Mabel Lee and Liu Jianmei . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Part I: Philosophical Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Chapter 2: Gao Xingjian and Philosophy Jean-Pierre Zarader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Chapter 3: Gao Xingjian: Exemplifying a Renaissance in Today’s World Liu Zaifu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Chapter 4: An Insignificant Individual’s Defiance Ming Jian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Chapter 5: The Art of Gao Xingjian Stephen Conlon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Chapter 6: Women and the Dao in Gao Xingjian’s Works Liu Jianmei . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Part II: Trans-Discipline, Trans-Genre, Trans-Media and Trans-Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Chapter 7: Nonattachment and Gao Xingjian’s Neutral Actor Gilbert Fong and Shelby Chan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Chapter 8: Gao Xingjian’s Search for a Scenic Dramaturgy and Cinematic Language in Song of the Night Mary Mazzilli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Chapter 9: Two Gao Xingjian Exhibitions Launched Simultaneously in Brussels during 2015 Liu Zaifu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

vi

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Chapter 10: The Mind’s Eye Kwok-kan Tam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Chapter 11: Chan Buddhist Scenography and Gao Xingjian’s Opera Snow in August Jiang Hanyang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Part III: Cine-Poems with Paintings, Dance, and Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Chapter 12: Floods and Forests Megan Evans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Chapter 13: Bodies and Paintings Fiona Sze-Lorrain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Chapter 14: From Theater to Cine-Poetry Wah Guan Lim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Chapter 15: Inlaying Images and Seeing Poetry Yue Huanyu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Part IV: Identifying and Defining the Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Chapter 16: Gao Xingjian: Autobiography, Auto-fiction, and Poetry Noël Dutrait . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Chapter 17: Working Through Trauma in Gao Xingjian’s One Man’s Bible Janet Shum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Chapter 18: Identity and Creation Michael Berry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Chapter 19: The Authorial Self in Gide’s The Fruits of the Earth, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain Pan Shuyang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Epilogue: A Panoramic View of Gao Xingjian’s World Liu Zaifu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289

Table of Contents

vii

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 Praise for Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 Cambria Sinophone World Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347

List of Figures

Figure 1: Preparation of the neutral actor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Figure 2: Performance of the neutral actor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Figure 3: L’Observation, ink painting, 114 cm x 90.5 cm, 1994  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Figure 4: Gao Xingjian, Minuit, 1995 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Figure 5: Gao Xingjian, Dark Story, 2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Figure 6: Gao Xingjian, Suspense, 2007 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Figure 7: Painter of the Soul, 2015 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 Figure 8: Gao Xingjian, L’Observateur, 2016 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Figure 9: Gao Xingjian, Waiting, 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 Figure 10: Gao Xingjian’s photograph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 Figure 11: Gao Xingjian, Portrait, 1995 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 Figure 12: Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait Bandaged, 1889 . . . . . . . . . . 159 Figure 13: Gao Xingjian, Regard intérieur, 1995 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 Figure 14: Gao Xingjian, Inner Eye, 2015 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

x

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Figure 15: Gao Xingjian, L’Oeil de la nuit, 1994 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Figure 16: Gao Xingjian, The Celestial Eye, 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Chapter 1

Introduction Mabel Lee and Liu Jianmei

Gao Xingjian (January 4, 1940–) grew up in a cosmopolitan family environment, as described in his autobiographical novel One Man’s Bible.1 He listened to Western classical music on the gramophone and took violin lessons. Because he was a sickly child, his mother taught him to read and write at home and, rather than have him mindlessly copy texts to practice writing, she asked him to keep a diary and write down his ideas and thoughts. The family library contained a sizeable collection of traditional Chinese literature, as well as numerous books on Western oil painting that fascinated him with their vibrant colors. He enjoyed free access to the library and was reading books for adult readers from a young age. His formal school education began after the establishment in 1949 of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and those memories of an idyllic childhood suddenly vanished as he, his family, and the whole population took part in the nationwide project to build New China. The surrounding adult environment was changing

2

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

rapidly, and unfortunate individuals who happened to be branded as counterrevolutionaries were being relocated for socialist “reeducation,” thrown into prison, or executed. Even as a youngster, he intuited his talents in both writing and painting and was intent on excelling as either a writer or an artist as his patriotic duty. By the late 1950s, escalating political campaigns made it clear that writers were being cowed into submission by public humiliations, beatings, imprisonment, and even death. For Gao Xingjian aspiring after a literary career no longer seemed to be an option, so on completing high school his preference was to study art. However, as the political climate continued to worsen, libraries were sealed off, banned books were trucked away for pulping, and the prospect of painting propaganda posters for life became a daunting reality. In 1957, he fortuitously enrolled in a five-year course in French Studies at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute. There, he further developed his cosmopolitan sensibilities and broadened his knowledge about the outside world. A young adult by this time, Gao’s passion for writing was reignited through his learning of the French language as well as his readings of books by French authors and French translations of various works. He wanted to write only of his own thoughts, emotions, and perceptions, but this did not meet the criteria for national cultural production, so he wrote in secret. A prolific reader, he not only combed through French magazines about world events and intellectual debates but also borrowed a shelf of books at a time from the Institute Library. He graduated in 1962 and started work as a translator and editor at the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, where again he had access to up-to-date French material about world events. At the start of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Gao Xingjian burned a suitcase of unpublished manuscripts rather than risk having them found by “pure bloodline” Red Guards from his workplace. His writings would have served as evidence for having him branded a counterrevolutionary. Unwittingly, he later allowed himself to become

Introduction

3

the audacious leader of the “rebel” Red Guards at Foreign Languages Press, until the Red Guard Movement itself was disbanded and the entire workplace was relocated to a May Seventh Cadre School. When the military arrived one day and he found colleagues distancing themselves from him, he knew he was to be targeted for public criticism. It was clear that the military were there to arrest him, and that night he fled on a train to a remote mountain village, where from 1970 to 1975 he worked as a peasant and, later, as the village schoolteacher. To console himself, he wrote in secret but took precautions to ensure that he could quickly hide what he was writing should anyone arrive unannounced for a visit. On returning to his old workplace in Beijing in 1975, as the harsh intellectual repression of the Cultural Revolution was being wound back, he started spending most of his salary on new books, such as translations of foreign authors that were flooding the market. When veteran writer Ba Jin (1904–2005) led the first delegation of PRC writers to France in 1979, Gao Xingjian traveled as his official translator. In the politically more relaxed environment, new literary magazines mushroomed, and in 1980 Gao Xingjian, at the age of forty, saw his writings published for the first time. His years of writing in secret— thinking and talking to himself—had been rehearsals for what he quickly wrote and sent to editors. In 1980, his publications included a novella, Stars on a Cold Night (Huacheng, no. 2; Guangzhou); a book of essays, Preliminary Explorations into the Art of Modern Fiction (serialized in Suibi monthly; Guangzhou); an essay, “The Agony of Modern French Literature” (Waiguo wenxue yanjiu, no. 1; Wuhan); an essay of literary criticism, “French Modernist People’s Poet Prévert and His Paroles” (Huacheng, no. 5; Guangzhou); and a prose essay, “Ba Jin in Paris” (Dangdai, no. 1, inaugural issue; Beijing). All this while, Gao Xingjian continued reading up on European literature, theater, art, and film because he wanted to explore these modern genres. He also had a strong interest in orally transmitted religious and quasi-religious folk practices; and on his trips to remote areas where these still flourished, he would take copious notes, recordings, and photographs.2

4

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

In 1981, he was reassigned to work as resident playwright at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre, and his publications that year included a novella A Pigeon Called Red Beak (Shouhuo, no. 1; Shanghai) and some short stories. Significantly, his Preliminary Explorations into the Art of Modern Fiction was published in Guangzhou as a book by Huacheng Publishing House and reprinted in 1982. In 1982, his play Absolute Signal (Shiyue, no. 5; Beijing), directed by Lin Zhaohua (b. 1936), premiered in a makeshift upstairs theater at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre; it was staged more than 100 times to enthusiastic audiences before being taken by ten theater groups and staged nationwide. That year he published more short stories and an essay, “Views on Fiction and Fiction Techniques” (Zhongshan, no. 6; Nanjing). The year 1983 saw his short stories published in literary journals in Shanghai, Dalian, Beijing, Nanjing, and Chengdu; his essays on dramaturgy were serialized in Suibi, but this suddenly stopped (no. 1–6, Guangzhou). Earlier that year, he had been summoned to attend three mass meetings of the Chinese Writers’ Association at three different venues, where his Preliminary Explorations into the Art of Modern Fiction was attacked for promoting the modernism of the decadent capitalist West. Unexpectedly, older, established writers and the editors of publishing houses came forward to speak in defense of both him and the book. Buoyed by this validation, in July 1983, without securing the required authorization, he proceeded to stage his play Bus Stop (Shiyue, no. 3, Beijing). Directed by Lin Zhaohua, Bus Stop was received with great enthusiasm. Performances took place again in an upstairs makeshift theater of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. The play was unlike anything the Beijing theater world had seen, and the futile act of people waiting for a bus that never comes was thought to be somewhat like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and yet not quite. That year Geremie Barmé’s “A Touch of the Absurd: Introducing Gao Xingjian, and His Play The Bus-stop”—published with a substantial extract of the play in English translation—took both playwright and play into the international literary world.3 Gao Xingjian certainly liked Theater of the Absurd, because it resonated with his keen

Introduction

5

sense of fun and playfulness; he had published essays on Beckett and Ionesco, and afterward his translation of Ionesco’s La Cantatrice Chauve (1985). However, what he wanted to explore was a new form of theater aesthetics: it would to some extent be informed by certain aspects of European dramaturgy, yet it would have psychological and philosophical roots deeply embedded in both Daoist and Chan (commonly known since the twentieth century in the West by its Japanese name Zen) Buddhist thinking. Of course, the authorities were hardly interested in his ideas on dramaturgical innovation, but they were highly anxious about the ambiguous thinking promoted in his play. His audacious staging of Bus Stop without authorization, unsurprisingly, led to its being banned after the tenth staging. With the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign gaining traction, publishers were instructed to shelve Gao’s new manuscripts. At precisely this time, he was also misdiagnosed with lung cancer at two different hospitals on two separate days, and it was not until two weeks later that a more thorough examination indicated conclusively that there had been a wrong diagnosis. During those two weeks of misdiagnosis, he had fully resigned himself to death, but upon receiving the seemingly miraculous reprieve he resolved thereafter to live his life more meaningfully.4 In the interim, he heard he would be sent to a prison farm in Qinghai province for reeducation but, decidedly not planning to wait to be sent, he reported to his workplace that he was leaving immediately for the mountain forests of the southwest to investigate the lives of woodcutters for a novel. During the next five months, he traveled to the source of the Yangtze River, then leisurely followed it to the sea, returning to Beijing at the end of the year after the political campaign began to peter out. His thoughts, emotions, and observations during this solitary journey are interwoven into his monumental novel Soul Mountain5 that he began writing during 1982 and completed in Paris in September 1989. In this autobiographical novel, while tracking the psychological processes of the protagonist—himself—he was also intent on bringing back musicality

6

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

to the written Chinese language that had been a casualty of China’s “modernization” projects during the twentieth century.6 He wrote Soul Mountain for his own enjoyment; he never imagined that it had any prospects of ever being published in China. The ban on his publications was lifted in 1984. His short stories such as “Huadou” and an essay on dramaturgy were published, and his novella A Pigeon Called Red Beak was published in book form. In 1985, when his new play Wild Man7 was staged in the main theater of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre, he took the opportunity to hold a solo exhibition of his Chinese ink paintings in the foyer. He had seen the originals of the oil-painting masters during his European travels and, abandoning the thought of ever excelling in oil painting, had for five years been exploring the expressive potential of Chinese inks. The staging of Wild Man was controversial, but his next play The Other Shore8 was stopped after a few rehearsals in 1986. He traveled on a German Academic Exchange Service (D.A.A.D.) fellowship to Germany in 1987, and while there he applied for temporary residence in France. By the end of the year he had relocated to Paris, where he has lived since. During his spectacular writing career in China lasting less than ten years he was harassed throughout by the Chinese cultural authorities, as documented in his essay “Wilted Chrysanthemums” (November 2, 1991).9 Living in Paris, he gradually began exhibiting his Chinese ink paintings and made a modest livelihood by selling these. On the odd occasion, he received provincial or municipal sponsorships for specific writing or theater projects. Works that he had started before leaving China soon found publishers in Taipei and Hong Kong, including a short story collection, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather10; two plays, Of Mountains and Seas: A Tragicomedy of the Gods in Three Acts11 and City of the Dead12; as well as his autobiographical novel Soul Mountain. Free of the politics that had once intruded on all aspects of his past life, he worked at a heightened pace to recoup the years of his creative life that had been lost. Throughout the 1990s he continued to paint for his

Introduction

7

exhibitions and, in addition to numerous group exhibitions, during 1985– 2000 he held thirty-five solo exhibitions in public galleries and institutions in various countries of Europe and Asia, and in the United States.13 From the 1990s he became increasingly involved in directing his own plays and training actors. His interest in photography and innovative film continued unabated, but much of his time was spent on new writings, as attested by the following titles. 1. Six Plays by Gao Xingjian (Taipei: Dijiao Publishing House, 1995). This was his first collection of plays published after his departure from Beijing, and it includes The Other Shore, City of the Dead, Of Mountains and Seas, Escape, Between Life and Death, and Dialogue and Rebuttal; 2. His play Escape,14 about the 1989 Tiananmen Square military crackdown on student protesters in Beijing, was attacked by the Chinese Democracy Movement for how it portrayed the student protestors. The PRC authorities also condemned the play because of its promiscuous protagonists and because Gao had not been in the square to witness what he alleges took place; 3. His play Weekend Quartet, written first in French as Quatre quatuors pour un week-end, was later rewritten in Chinese;15 4. His book of essays on Chinese intellectuals, nationalism, and the political pressures exerted on literature and art, titled Without Isms;16 5. His long critique of contemporary art practices, “Another Kind of Aesthetics”;17 6. His autobiographical novel One Man’s Bible, a harsh indictment of his own weak and cowardly psychology and behavior during the chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution. The year 2000 was the centenary of the Nobel Prize. For patriotic Chinese, it was considered the height of national humiliation that no “Chinese writer” had ever been awarded the highly sought-after prize for literature. Since the mid-1980s, the PRC government, Chinese intellectuals,

8

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

and probably the entire population were united in the hope that a “Chinese writer” would be declared the winner. In October 2000 the Swedish Academy announced that the “Chinese writer” Gao Xingjian was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He had published a large body of works in Chinese, and his major works were available in French, Swedish, and English editions. In addition, his plays had been performed in various countries on five continents. However, he had taken French citizenship in 1997, so his Nobel win was not cause for PRC celebrations. Besides, his 1989 media tirades against the PRC military crackdown in Tiananmen Square and his play Escape had, of course, been noted. A media block was imposed on the award ceremony of the Nobel Prize in Literature that year, although Gao’s acceptance speech presented in Chinese was simultaneously available in Swedish, French, and English translation on the Swedish Academy website. At the time of his Nobel award Gao was already preoccupied with planning the production of his opera Snow in August, scheduled to take place December 19–22, 2002, at the National Opera House in Taipei. This required retraining traditional Peking Opera performers in his “neutral actor” performance technique, and he also insisted on micromanaging all aspects of the production. His own artworks would form backdrops for the scenes, and the action, acrobatics, martial arts, and stunts of Peking Opera and local opera would be deployed for what he called “total theater” or “omnipotent theater.” The music was composed by Xu Shuya, who had relocated to Paris in 1988 from Shanghai, and including the choir and symphony orchestra there was a total of 200 performers. In Taipei, during rehearsals in late 2002 Gao collapsed but recovered adequately to direct, with help, the premiere performance before returning to Paris to direct the Comédie Français production of his play Quatre quatuors pour un week-end. He underwent heart surgery in February and March 2003, but because the year 2003 had been designated “Gao Xingjian Year” by the City of Marseille, Gao was scheduled to direct the premiere performance of Snow in August at Opéra Marseille, as well as his new play Le Quêteur de la Mort at Théâtre du Gymnase. He collapsed during

Introduction

9

rehearsals for the latter, but it premiered with the help of codirector Romain Bonnin, and ran September 23–26, 2003. Snow in August was postponed until further notice. This time he was incapacitated, and on the brink of death. During most of 2004 he could only paint, write poetry, and think about filmmaking to satisfy his intellectual and aesthetic curiosity. He has since produced three “cine-poems” that incorporate his ideas for painting, photography, dance, and sound: Silhouette/Shadow (2007), After the Flood (2008), and Requiem for Beauty (2013). Marketing these films has proved impossible, so they are usually shown at his art exhibitions or attached to his art books. His first collection of poetry, Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts (2012), is profoundly concerned with existential problems, humans in the natural environment, and the death of beauty in contemporary urban society. They are informed by a unique form of absurdist aesthetics that approximates the gong’an of Chan Buddhism (popularly known in the West as the koan of Japanese Zen Buddhism), as well as Daoist notions of untrammeled freedom. Since his Nobel win, Gao has found readers/audiences in growing numbers and his work continues to be increasingly recognized globally. As a distinguished guest, he has attended celebrity literary and arts events such as La Milenesiana (2008), the Prague Writers Festival (2010), and the Literature Festival of Barolo (2017). He is a fluent speaker of Chinese and French, and is equally engaging via translators in other languages, including English. In 2007, as a special guest at the University of Notre Dame, through a translator he held seminar discussions with academics, writers, and artists, and he also spoke at the launch of his exhibition of ink paintings, Between Figurative and Abstract, at the university’s Snite Gallery. Gao was a distinguished guest at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) held in Boston in January 2013 and participated in two lively sessions with audiences drawn from various language backgrounds and literary specializations.

10

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Gao’s intellectual and aesthetic concerns come through in his works both as a visual artist and poet. Committed to the notion of total freedom in artistic creation, his creative works break with traditional methodologies and are innovative in their own right. In his film Requiem for Beauty, Gao laments the death of beauty in the present globalized era, along with the death of individual freedom embedded in literary and art creation: “If another value system replaces the individual’s aesthetic judgment, be it a social, political, or ethical value judgment, then the individual as an artist will be dead.”18 However, while mourning the disappearance of beauty in modern society, he avoids descending into nihilism but instead posits an interesting question: “Is another renaissance in literature and art possible?”19 In his essay “Call for a Renaissance in Literature and Art,” he gives a positive answer: “Cast aside the overturning of aesthetics and trendy hype, and a renaissance in literature and art will logically follow.”20 At the launch of Gao Xingjian’s painting exhibition in the Kubo-Kutxa Gallery of San Sebastián in 2015, Chairperson Xabier Iturbe proclaimed: “We are pleased to display the work of this brilliant visionary, who personifies a present-day renaissance like no other.”21 Barcelona’s wellknown journalist, Miriam Tey has noted: “Like a lighthouse, Gao indicates a path for us along which there is a way out, and from this hopeful perspective he issues this ‘call for a new renaissance.’”22 Literary critic Liu Zaifu has observed that the case of Gao Xingjian is evidence of a present-day renaissance.23 According to Liu, unlike the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, which was a cultural movement highlighting humanism as a collective effort, Gao exemplifies one living person’s renaissance through his multifaceted talents manifested across genres: fiction, poetry, drama, painting, film, photography, and literary theory. Whereas the European Renaissance may be said to have resurrected Greek philosophy’s emphasis on man’s power against God as the absolute truth, Gao’s rediscovery of the human not only emphasizes the autonomy of the self—which, akin to

Introduction

11

Zhuangzi’s absolute spiritual freedom, rejects the individual’s bondage by worldly matters—but also pledges to enact the genuine revelation of the complicated dark and fragile side of human nature. By choosing the exteriority of the in-between (Jean-Pierre Zarader’s term), Gao challenges the monistic or unitary view that assigns individuals to one of the perennial binary oppositions, such as progressive or reactionary, new or old, revolutionary or antirevolutionary, without allowing differences or multiple possibilities. He also questions Hegel’s and Marx’s descriptions of linear historical process in the form of determinism from lower to higher stages, which excludes the notion of individual freedom. Like Zhuangzi, who questions any fixed views concerning “right” and “wrong,” Gao Xingjian targets the modern mentality that is obsessed with progress, revolution, or historical determinism without tolerating the potentially conflicting and incommensurable values in individuals. The essays collected here in Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics demonstrate the extensive reach of Gao Xingjian’s transcultural, transdisciplinary, and transmedia explorations. Our objective in this volume is to showcase how such a panoramic artist or a polymath has successfully personified a present-day renaissance24 by persistently projecting the struggles and agonies of the individual’s inner landscape into vivid images on stage, in films, in black-and-white paintings, in multilayered narrative expressions of fiction and poetry, and even in dance and music: his creations evoke a penetrating sense of sincerity and truth in audiences and readers. This volume is divided into four parts: on philosophical inquiry; on transdiscipline, transgenre, transmedia, and transculture; on cine-poems with paintings, dance, and music; and on identifying and defining the self. The authors each probe different aspects of Gao Xingjian’s work, depending upon their diverse specializations. Part One considers the philosophical dimension of Gao Xingjian’s oeuvre, a dimension conspicuously lacking in most contemporary Chinese literature and art. Jean-Pierre Zarader, a well-known philosopher and historian of philosophy as well as a specialist on Malraux’s writings on

12

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

art, interrogates the antiphilosophy thrust that Gao Xingjian adopts and argues that in fact Gao’s works are imbued with philosophy. He analyzes Gao Xingjian’s complex relationship with Spinoza, Descartes, Sartre, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, Benjamin, Deleuze, Derrida—a cluster of Western philosophers who have reflected on the questions of the self and philosophical aesthetics. Noting that Gao’s recurring critique of “the negation of negation” is in line with much of contemporary philosophy’s unceasing battle against a form of thinking about totality, he also concludes that Gao has created his own path by rethinking an exteriority of the in-between by which to transcend all binary oppositions and established paradigms. Liu Zaifu provides the rationale and unifying backbone to this book with his assessment of Gao Xingjian’s achievements in terms of world cultural developments. In “Gao Xingjian: Exemplifying a Renaissance in Today’s World,” he demonstrates that since the 1990s Gao has cogently and systematically argued on the international stage against the antiaesthetic politics of so-called modernity and its various postmodern reincarnations in the visual arts. The Western art world had long succumbed to the dictates of modernity and, as a newcomer, the Eastern art world sought to be even more outrageously postmodern than its Western mentors. Gao successfully isolated the political dynamic inherent in so-called modernism, and while Western intellectuals have remained strangely silent on the topic, straddling Eastern and Western cultures, Gao has had no compunction in protesting against the pernicious impact of modernity, particularly in the visual arts. In his own ink paintings, he verified the time-honored aesthetics involving the individual artist as the axis in a search for truth and beauty. Stephen Conlon’s essay “The Art of Gao Xingjian: Metamorphosis and the Grotesque in Soul Mountain” probes the aesthetic dynamics of this multidimensional novel. Conlon presents his reading of the novel in the light of the Western aesthetics of metamorphosis and examines

Introduction

13

Gao’s “Chan way of seeing” that engenders new forms and perceptions of understanding and enlightenment. In the next chapter, Ming Jian discusses how Gao Xingjian ponders a wide array of philosophical questions on death, through which to understand the predicament of human existence and to affirm the resistance of a fragile and insignificant individual in The Man Who Questions Death. For him Gao Xingjian’s notion of self-killing contains positive justification of human freedom and dignity and indicates that Gao’s defiance of death is to live in the moment, which is related to “Chan zero time” and goes beyond a linear progression. Liu Jianmei then turns our attention to the issue of women and the Dao. Exploring the connection between the Chan Buddhist comprehension of Dao and the representation of women, she considers not only the ways Gao Xingjian regards women as a privileged trope for defying social convention but also how he incorporates spirituality into women’s unique biological and psychological construction. Part Two underscores Gao Xingjian’s ability to engage in transdiscipline, transgenre, transmedia, and transculture endeavors—freely roaming among various art and artistic forms as well as various literary, art, and cultural traditions. Gilbert Fong and Shelby Chan suggest that Gao Xingjian’s penchant for the Buddhist concept of nonattachment is the key to understanding his idea of theater and his relationship between life and art. They argue that Gao’s strategy of the “neutral actor” allows the actor to embody the nonattachment of Chan Buddhism and hence to possess the facility to shift seamlessly among the everyday self of the actor, the neutral actor, and the character. For Fong and Chan, Gao Xingjian offers a unique and dynamic version of an actor-centered theater. Mary Mazzilli focuses on the discussion of scenic pictorial dramaturgy and cinematic language that Gao Xingjian develops in Song of the Night. By analyzing nontextual elements such as the role of the dancer, the musician, and their theatrical potential in performance, and the painting analogy that connects with Huang Zuolin’s idea of xieyi, she concludes that Gao’s

14

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

concept of total theater combined with the use of split personality has virtually created a cinematic effect of hallucinations. The word xieyi, a premodern aesthetic category in Chinese art discourse, is the manifestation of an artistic mental perspective that goes beyond time and space limitations and generates endless sensations and feelings. Jiang Hanyang identifies xieyi scenography in Gao Xingjian’s Buddhist-inflected play Snow in August. As he puts it, insofar as Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch of Chan Buddhism and the lead character in Snow in August, is portrayed as the incarnation of surpassing the world’s surface or “sensory reality,” it is possible to establish a connection between such a philosophy of transcendence and the scenic xieyi that indicates an “imaginary reality,” beyond the verisimilar effect of illusionistic theater. Liu Zaifu has tracked Gao’s career since the late 1970s, and his essay “Two Gao Xingjian Exhibitions Launched Simultaneously in Brussels during 2015” tells of the extraordinary recognition Gao Xingjian has received as an artist in Belgium. Liu discusses how Gao’s large-scale new series The Awakening of the Consciousness was launched as a permanent display in a specifically designated hall of The Belgian Royal Museums of Fine Arts a day before the “Gao Xingjian Retrospective” was launched at Museum of Ixelles (February 26–May 31, 2015). Kwok-kan Tam’s “The Mind’s Eye: Subjectivity in Gao Xingjian’s Painting” starts from a discussion of Gao Xingjian’s “pseudo-perspective” that functions to present the mental image and then emphasizes the importance of understanding Gao Xingjian’s paintings as an “inner landscape” or mindscape—a key that “illuminates hidden meanings of his Chan Buddhist approach to art.” He identifies the mindscape that contains philosophical inquiries as inner visions of the self, a self perpetually involved in the strenuous process of soul searching in the vast universe and consciously pursuing Chan self-transcendence. Part Three extends the similar concerns of transmedia and transculture to cine-poems with paintings, dance, and music—a relatively unexplored area in Gao Xingjian studies. Megan Evans, who directed and produced

Introduction

15

Gao Xingjian’s Wild Man, provides an in-depth analysis of the play Wild Man and the film After the Flood, works belonging to the new field of ecoaesthetics, and Gao’s transcultural aesthetic of catastrophe. By analyzing the aesthetic strategies of “polyphonic openness” manifested in Gao’s innovative theatrical style and cinematic composition orchestrated with poetry, painting, dance, and music, Evans shows how these two works convey deep eco-ethical and spiritual concerns for humankind and for its relationship to worlds beyond. Another essay about After the Flood that deals with the theme of catastrophe is written by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. She deploys methodologies inspired by Gao Xingjian’s theory of “tripartite film” and argues that while body and paintings are independent entities, they constantly engage in dialogue to produce new meanings and render a philosophical vision of human beings in the face of an ecological crisis. Following this, Wah Guan Lim offers a detailed analysis of the ways Gao’s dramaturgy has evolved from his works of fiction and plays to cinepoetry. He argues that Gao’s unconventional cine-poetry has continued his performance theories such as “the neutral actor” that resembles the shifting of pronouns in his fiction. In the cine-poem Requiem for Beauty, the Thinker with a “third eye” allows the self to scrutinize inwardly and also to distance himself from the crowd. By so doing, Lim notes that Gao has created a unique cinematic poetry that challenges the hegemony of commercialization and its stifling of artistic creation. Focusing on the innovative interplay between visual language and poetry presented in Requiem for Beauty, Yue Huanyu theorizes the structure of Gao’s cine-poem as a process of “inlaying images,” which generates a visual effect of “seeing poetry.” He suggests that transcending the limits of words, Requiem for Beauty is not merely a lament for the death of beauty in the modern world but also a celebration of the new birth of authentic beauty and the revival of the independence of art. Part Four takes Gao Xingjian’s authorial self or autobiography and identity as a key point to comprehend and decipher his literary, poetic,

16

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

theatrical, pictorial, and cinematic creations. Noël Dutrait stresses the significance of the autobiographical aspect in Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible. Regarding the pronouns “I” and “you” as the embodiment of the narrator’s double identity, he considers Gao’s poetry, such as The Way of the Wandering Bird, Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts, and Requiem for Beauty, to be autobiographical poems that closely resemble and correspond to the life of the author, who enjoys total freedom after his self-exile to Paris but remains prisoner to his reality as an aging man who has confronted death several times, the existential dilemma of being human. Michael Berry conducted an interview with Gao Xingjian at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in January 2013, Boston. Organized by Cambria Press, this interview presents the dialogue between Gao and Berry, as well as Gao and the audience, providing firsthand information on Gao Xingjian’s autobiographical self. Instead of identifying himself as either a Chinese citizen or a French citizen, Gao identifies as a citizen of the world or a cosmopolitan who remains in a neutral position when confronting antithetical conflict, while being deeply concerned about human creative endeavors and thinking. In “Working Through Trauma in Gao Xingjian’s One Man’s Bible,” Janet Shum elucidates the interplay between the autobiographical mode and the narrative voice in One Man’s Bible, a novel simultaneously representing the theme of escape from the hegemonic discourse of ideology in China and the theme of return to the traumatic past and memory. She argues that an aesthetic distance Gao Xingjian creates between the temporality of the “you” of today and the “he” of the past allows him to engage in questioning the reflective self, rendering a mode of self-parody instead of the therapeutic effect often seen in the traditional tales of a tragic hero seeking redemption and purification. By contextualizing her analysis of an excerpt from Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain in the readings of André Gide’s The Fruits of the Earth and Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, all of which are structured

Introduction

17

as “open diaries,” Pan Shuyang explores how Gao Xingjian’s individual narrative voice helps to clarify his authorial self in the novel. Using a comparative approach, she looks at the self-reflective mode in these three literary masters’ work and delves into how the special authorial presence mirrors Gao Xingjian’s position on the literary articulation of individual truth. The unprecedented proliferation of cultural consumerism, the interference of political ideologies and concepts, and the fascinating conjuncture of popular culture and high culture make us less confident that creative freedom in literature and art can liberate itself from utilitarianism. Nor can we trust that literature and art can foster individual autonomy. The sense of the self in the contemporary world is usually organized around something other than autonomy, such as political and commercial rules, all of which are derived from others. However, Gao Xingjian urges us to extricate ourselves from the wretched cycle of politically or commercially driven literature and art. It creates nothing new, simply works that indulge in nonstop negations, aggressive provocations, and sensationalism, which should all be committed “to the garbage heap.”25 This volume crosses the boundaries of traditional academic writing and takes the reader to the in-between spaces of different styles of writing, research, and commentary, which help us better understand Gao’s endeavors in literary, theatrical, and pictorial creation and their accompanying philosophical insights. The chapters in this book transgress the boundaries of different media and genres—fiction, drama, poetry, painting, film—in their deliberations, and these diverse approaches serve to broaden the scope of Gao Xingjian research through what can be described as a dimension of heightened freedom, that is suggestive of Chan Buddhist comprehension. Gao Xingjian often states that for him creative innovations emerge at boundaries and in-between space. The aim of this collection thus seeks to explore such boundaries and inbetween spaces in academic research on Gao Xingjian.

18

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Notes 1. Gao Xingjian, One Man’s Bible, trans. Mabel Lee (New York, Sydney, London: HarperCollins, 2002; first Chinese edition, Taipei: Lianjing, 1999). Details of his early childhood draw largely on this autobiographical novel, but occasionally some minor details have surfaced from our conversations over a period of more than a quarter of a century. 2. The publication details of Gao Xingjian’s uncollected early works are listed in chronologies contained in Liu Zaifu’s publications. A month after the October 2000 announcement that Gao Xingjian had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Liu Zaifu published a selection of essays as On Gao Xingjian’s Stance (Hong Kong: Ming Pao). In his subsequent collections on Gao Xingjian, chronologies are attached as appendices: On Gao Xingjian (Taipei: Lianjing, 2004), Gao Xingjian Introductions and Prefaces (Hong Kong: Great Mountain Culture, 2011), On Gao Xingjian Again (Taipei: Lianjing, 2016). His edited volume of essays by Li Zehou, Lin Gang, and Noël Dutrait, Reading Gao Xingjian (Hong Kong: Great Mountain Culture, 2013), also contains a chronology. 3. See Renditions: A Chinese-English Translation Magazine 19/20 (1983): 373–386. 4. See Gao Xingjian, “Wilted Chrysanthemums,” in Gao, The Case for Literature, trans. Mabel Lee (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 140–154. 5. Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain, trans. Mabel Lee (Sydney and New York: HarperCollins, 2000); Chinese edition, Lingshan (Taipei: Lianjing, 1990). 6. See Gao Xingjian, “Literature and Metaphysics: About Soul Mountain” and “The Modern Chinese Language and Literary Creation,” in Gao, The Case for Literature, 82–103 and 104–122, respectively. 7. Gao Xingjian, Wild Man, trans. Bruno Roubicek, in “Wild Man: A Contemporary Chinese Spoken Drama,” Asian Theatre Journal 7, no. 2 (Autumn 1990): 184–249. 8. Chinese edition, Taipei: Dijiao Publishing House, 1995. Gao Xingjian, The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1999), 1–44. 9. Gao, “Wilted Chrysanthemums,” 140–154. 10. Taipei: Lianhe wenxue, 1989. English edition, trans. Mabel Lee (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).

Introduction

19

11. Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 1993. English edition, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2008). 12. In Six Plays by Gao Xingjian (Taipei: Dijiao Publishing House, 1995). English edition, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong in Gao Xingjian, City of the Dead and Song of the Night (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2015), 1–61. 13. See excellent studies on his art in publications such as Daniel Bergez, Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul (London: Asia Ink, 2013). 14. Chinese edition, Jintian magazine (Stockholm, 1990). English trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong, in Gao Xingjian, Escape and The Man Who Questions Death (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2007), 3–71; see also, in that book, Mabel Lee’s “Two Autobiographical Plays by Gao Xingjian,” vii–xviii. 15. Chinese edition, Hong Kong: New Century, 1996. English edition, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong, in Gao, The Other Shore, 191–125. 16. Chinese edition Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 1996. Selected essays are included in Gao, The Case for Literature. 17. In The Rationale for Literature (Hong Kong: Ming Pao, 2001). English editions: “Return to Painting,” trans. from the French by Nadia Benabid, in Gao Xingjian, Return to Painting (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 10– 55; and Gao Xingjian, “Another Kind of Aesthetics,” trans. from the Chinese by Mabel Lee, in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), 89–158. 18. Gao Xingjian, “Another Kind of Aesthetics,” 103. 19. Gao Xingjian, Gao Xingjian: Pizkunderako deia Llamada a un Renacimiento (Donostia/San Sebastian: Sala Kubo-kutxa Aretoa, 2016), 96. 20. Gao, Gao Xingjian: Pizkunderako deia Llamada a un Renacimiento, 96. 21. Xabier Iturbe, qtd. in Gao, Gao Xingjian: Pizkunderako deia Llamada a un Renacimiento, 91. 22. Miriam Tey, qtd. in Gao, Gao Xingjian: Pizkunderako deia Llamada a un Renacimiento, 91. 23. Liu Zaifu, “Gao Xingjian: A Concrete Example of a Literary and Art Renaissance in Contemporary Times,” in Liu, On Gao Xingjian Again, 3–13. 24. Xabier Iturbe, qtd. in Gao, Gao Xingjian: Pizkunderako deia Llamada a un Renacimiento, 91. 25. Gao, Gao Xingjian: Pizkunderako deia Llamada a un Renacimiento, 96.

Part I

Philosophical Inquiry

Chapter 2

Gao Xingjian and Philosophy Jean-Pierre Zarader

It might be interesting to try to clarify what Gao Xingjian’s actual attitude to philosophy is because, beyond his declared distance from philosophy as an autonomous discipline, he is clearly fascinated by philosophical inquiry. In the last couple of pages of chapter 72 of Soul Mountain, where the author wonders what the most critical thing in fiction is, he conjures up all sorts of possibilities, from the most feasible to the least. Interestingly, the following possibility appears, buried among dozens of others but listed there all the same: “Nevertheless he is intrigued with using language to talk … about self-worship being dubbed philosophy.”1 When he takes up questions about the “self” raised by Montaigne or Pascal, Gao is not content just to take them up; he takes them over and takes them further, giving them a dimension they did not previously have. One Man’s Bible attests to this process, tending as that book does to turn not the “self,” but “awareness of the self” into a sort of cogito capable of distinguishing man from the world of other living beings

24

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

and forming the basis of man’s freedom—so much so that the narrator’s “thanking God” is not directed at God, or fate, or chance, but indeed at consciousness of a self that is an awareness of existing: “You think that it is this consciousness of your self, this awareness of your own existence, that is to be thanked.”2 Exploring the territory between Descartes and Sartre, Gao goes off on his own, on a path that also takes him through Pascal, Kant, and Bergson, and even Benjamin, to say nothing of Derrida. Yet that does not stop him from—in as undogmatic a manner as possible —subjecting this “self” to the following question: “This self of yours, too, is an existence born of nonexistence. Saying that it exists brings it into existence, and saying that it doesn’t exist turns it back into a mass of inchoate nebula. Is this self that you are striving to create so unique? Or, in other words, do you have a self?”3 It’s true that, as if frightened by the unfathomable nature of such philosophical questions, Gao sometimes seems to take refuge in a kind of hedonism or a feeling of existing that might remind us of the author of Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “What is eternal is this instant. You perceive and, therefore, you exist, otherwise you are a nebulous unconsciousness. So, live in this instant: feel this gentle midautumn sunlight!”4 But the temptation of hedonism, which is undeniably there and doubtless owes a great deal to Gao’s earlier life in Mao’s China,5 is not the last word in his oeuvre. For that oeuvre returns to philosophy, if seemingly reluctantly, to take this meditation on the “self” to a much deeper level and reassert the importance of what Kant called dignity. Gao does not connect this, as Kant does, to the existence in man of moral law, but to the consciousness man has of being a self, a “for oneself”— meaning, a free entity. Again, in One Man’s Bible, Gao implicitly takes up Pascal’s comment about “the thinking reed,” which here becomes “the grass under the blade,” and re-enlists it in his own experience, with the character supposedly addressing Mao himself as he stands in front of the great man’s mausoleum:

Gao Xingjian and Philosophy

25

What he finally wanted to say was that although it was possible to kill a person, no matter how frail the person was, that person’s human dignity could not be killed. A person is human because this bit of self-respect is indestructible … People have been killed off like the grass under the blade, but does the grass under the blade seek to be forgiven? … As well as life, people have human dignity... Dignity is an awareness of existence, and it is in this that the power of the frail individual lies! Once one’s awareness of existence is extinguished, the apparition of existence, too, is extinguished.6 This same idea of dignity, in the sense in which Kant says that all things have a price but only the individual human being has dignity, surfaces in Gao’s play The Man Who Questions Death, when This Man performs a parody of being locked up in a museum of contemporary art: “Yes, you, you’re the one! You’ve been nabbed. A live exhibit, a human, what a wonderful idea!”7 And as if Gao were aware of treading a fine line here between literature and philosophy, the narrator of One Man’s Bible adds, in a sentence that cancels out all such philosophical considerations while maintaining them, a sentence that slips through between the two disciplines: “Enough of all this, all this nonsense. But he had sustained himself precisely through that nonsense.”8 It’s true that in Soul Mountain Gao compares philosophy unfavorably to fiction, the first being a mere intellectual game whereas the second is a product of sensibility: “Philosophy in the end is an intellectual game. At limits unattainable by mathematics and the empirical sciences … Fiction is different from philosophy because it is the product of sensory perception. … Furthermore, it is the same as life and does not have an ultimate goal.”9 But it is clear here that by philosophy Gao means what he sometimes refers to as metaphysics, which he reduces to logic: “Best leave it to the philosophers to talk about metaphysics, just keep your mind on walking along your road.”10 It is also clear that he himself does philosophy, in his novels, when, following Montaigne and Pascal, he questions the notion of self: “I don’t know if you have ever observed this strange thing, the self. Often the more you look the more it doesn’t

26

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

seem to be like it, and the more you look the more it isn’t it. It’s just like when one is lying on the grass staring at a cloud.”11 But he also does philosophy when, following Spinoza, he underscores the subjectivity of perception: “That is entirely up to you, she will be what you want her to be, if you think she is beautiful she will be beautiful, if there is evil in your heart you will only see demons.”12 As for the task he has set himself—“keep your mind on walking along your road”—this does not boil down to withdrawal or simple introspection. The road in question is the path of creation, which is not already marked out as a path, even if it does record traces of the past. It is a path that the creative act itself opens up, in a real journey that, like all real journeys, has no predetermined goal: “The true traveler is without goal, it is the absence of goals which creates the ultimate traveler.”13 But Gao’s assertion goes beyond aesthetics. Looking again, in One Man’s Bible, at a thirty-year-old photograph that dates back to the days of the reform-through-labor program on the farm known as a “May Seventh Cadre School,” and remarking, “He was proud, somewhat arrogant, even as a convict, and this had probably saved him from being crushed,” Gao adds: “Using this instant of time as the starting point, for you, writing is a spiritual journey, either in deep reflection, or talking to yourself, and you obtain joy and fulfillment in the process. Nothing frightens you anymore, for freedom eradicates fear.”14 This is a way of saying that the road evoked in Soul Mountain runs through aesthetics and that, within aesthetics itself, even if it doesn’t exactly run between literature, art, and philosophy, then it at least runs through literature and art, sticking as closely as possible to philosophy. Philosophy is at work, what’s more, even when Gao strives to distance himself from it, as he does when he tries, in his theoretical essays, to distinguish the aesthetics of the artist from philosophical aesthetics.15 In that bid he borrows heavily, and seemingly unwillingly, from philosophical aesthetics, and especially from Kant. This is the case when he asserts that “the capacity to perceive beauty … is a natural endowment

Gao Xingjian and Philosophy

27

unique to humankind … The possibility of communication demonstrates that although beauty is a subjective experience, it is not arbitrary and it has an independent reality.”16 That is exactly what Kant said when he asserted that “beauty is valid only for human beings” and that we can “discuss” beauty, even if we cannot “dispute” it—meaning, decide through proofs. It is also the case when Gao asserts that “This power of discernment and creative talent … can emerge only from the artist’s own unique understanding as an individual. Likewise, as to whether the artist’s creations will be able to transcend practical utility is also decided by the individual artist. … There is no need to evaluate art with instrumental rationality.”17 That is the Kantian notion of “purposiveness without a purpose” (also translated as “finality without an end”) and of the beautiful as offering “universal” and “disinterested” pleasure. In other words, even when he means, rightly, to distinguish between the aesthetics of the artist and philosophical aesthetics, Gao himself engages in philosophy, and does so, moreover, on this precise point, in the dual sense of the term: he deals both with the judgment of taste (the feeling for the beautiful) and with the creative act (the artist). He thereby achieves the complexity of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. That work is largely a meditation on the beautiful, but it also contains a few passages, arguably the most important, that deal with the creative act—focusing not on aesthetic judgment, which is as valid for natural beauty as it is for artfully produced beauty, but on genius, the talent that “gives the rule to art.” In other words, the genius is a producer of forms inspired by “the models” of the great masters he imitates, not in a servile fashion, but by himself demonstrating radical originality. These sections constitute in themselves a small philosophical treatise on the production of art. And it is on this score that Kant’s influence makes itself felt, on Gao as much as on the man who wrote The Voices of Silence, André Malraux, and on all contemporary art theorists, sometimes without their being aware of it. The reflection on philosophical aesthetics is not, furthermore, limited to Kant. The Man Who Questions Death indeed opens with the problem of the museum of contemporary art, with This Man’s lines

28

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

clearly amounting to a critique of contemporary art and its museums, a critique whose vehemence is both allowed and required at the same time by the burlesque nature of the play. But what he says also denotes an understanding of such art and its museums insofar as the idea of decontextualization is in play (“used again”) along with the notion of exhibition value, so dear to Benjamin (“all kinds of exhibits”): There are urinals made in France and the United States, also Asian imports, odds and ends, from brand-new refrigerators to a hodgepodge of stuff one finds in junk shops, cigarette butts, and even used sanitary napkins. Anything goes, no matter how broken or damaged, as long as they don’t stink. If worst comes to worst, they could be sterilized and used again, which is called “recycling.” There are all kinds of exhibits but no living human beings. Why not?18 Philosophy is again in play when Gao reminds us that he has never stopped asking himself about the meaning of life, and this from a very early age, even if he ends up asserting that this line of questioning should be abandoned.19 And it is even more emphatically in play when, reflecting on art production and language, he rephrases, in his own language, Bergson’s analyses of the mismatch between ordinary everyday language and the singular expression of artists; and again, ten years further down the track, when, in “The Art of Fiction,” he opposes concepts to things and to lived experience, stressing that “it is through concepts that language evokes people’s existing perceptual experiences.”20 But before I quote the paragraph in One Man’s Bible in which Gao comes so close to Bergson, I would like to stress the fact that, in keeping with his usual practice, these arguments of Gao’s correct the impression left by the preceding paragraph, which is about his relationship to writing. Gao’s relationship to what we call writing is, as so often in his work, in fact more complex than a quick reading might suggest. Taken literally, his idea of writing might seem a bit quaint to Westerners used to seeing writing as being opposed to nature and sometimes even to life. Gao, or more precisely the narrator of his novel One Man’s Bible, reminds us at once of the

Gao Xingjian and Philosophy

29

rebellious nature of writing and of his own rejection of politically engaged literature; he then seems to connect writing to a form of hedonism— two terms that contemporary thought, within the dual and paradoxical tradition of Romanticism and surrealism, tends more to see as opposed: He wrote because he needed to. It was the only way he could enjoy total freedom; he didn’t write for a livelihood. He also did not use his pen as a weapon to fight for some cause, and he didn’t have a sense of mission. He wrote for his own pleasure, talking to himself so that he could listen to and observe himself. It was a means of experiencing those feelings of the little life that remained for him.21 Well, the paragraph that follows, in which Gao comes so close to Bergson, catches the reader off balance as the narrator, shifting focus from writing to what he calls language, goes on to discuss what we call writing in quite precise terms. Reading on, we realize that this specific relationship to writing, which for us is irreducible to hedonism of any kind, is in play whenever Gao refers to his own relationship to language—and the juxtaposition of the two approaches may well have to do with the close connection between China and the West that he never ceases exploring: The only thing in his past he didn’t break with was the language. He could, of course, write in another language, but he didn’t abandon his language, because it was convenient and he didn’t need to look up words in a dictionary. However, conventional language did not suit him, and he had to look for his own voice. He wanted to listen intently to what he was saying, as if he were listening to music, but he found language always lacking in refinement. He was certain that one day he would abandon language and rely on other media to convey his feelings. He admired the agile bodies of some performers, especially dancers. He would love to be able to use his body to freely express himself: to casually stumble, fall over, get up and go on dancing.22 Here we immediately grasp Gao’s relationship to philosophy, and its singularity, just as we grasp how reductive it would be to see that relationship merely as a rediscovery of what philosophers have already

30

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

thought. For although the assertion that everyday language, the most “convenient,” is not necessarily the most “suitable,” brings us back to the difficulty, which Bergson pointed out, that ordinary language has in expressing feelings and other immediate givens of consciousness, Gao, far from staying with that observation, imperceptibly moves on to the need to find “his own voice”—something only an artist, not a philosopher, would note—and then goes beyond even the music comparison to end by wondering if he needs to find other material. He thereby anticipates Requiem for Beauty, a film that, without “abandoning” language, makes it part of an all-encompassing object more “suited” to the need he feels to express himself. And it is no accident that he follows the reference to music with a reference to performance art, the art of actors and dancers, since only film can encompass these different languages, or these arts that are beyond language. When Gao evokes the “admiration” he feels watching dancers, with their “agile bodies,” whom he can’t imitate because “age was unrelenting,” it does feel a bit as if he were announcing the work to come, Requiem for Beauty, since he directs actors and dancers in that film, like the conductor of an orchestra, and they are like an extension of his own writing. And even beyond the film, Gao returns to that “inner voice” to bring out what we might call man’s metaphysical dimension, which he here calls gratitude for his existence: He was no longer capable of dancing, and could only somersault about in language. Language was light and portable, and it had him under its spell. He was a carnival performer in language, an incurable addict, he had to talk, and even alone he was always talking to himself. This inner voice had become the affirmation of his existence. He had already formed the habit of transforming his feelings into language, and not to do so left him feeling unfulfilled.23 Even if “The Art of Fiction” contains an attack on writing that is a thinly veiled attack on Derrida, since what is under attack is this very primacy, in every sense of the term, of writing over the voice, “The Art of Fiction” is also one of the most beautiful panegyrics to writing and to language ever written. After first referring to the notion of “stream

Gao Xingjian and Philosophy

31

of consciousness” and the need to invent a language able to actualize such streams of consciousness,24 something Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner obviously managed to do; and after stressing the fact that “linguistic tracking of psychological activities must pass through a grammatical filter, then a time-sequence funnel,”25 Gao adds that he prefers the expression “flow of language”—which he has invented—to the more traditional expression “stream of consciousness”: “the string of sentences obtained would be more accurately denoted as a flow of language.”26 The poetics here touches on philosophy, of course, and most appropriately. But Gao’s attitude to philosophy largely outstrips these considerations, for it also touches on the role history plays in his oeuvre, not just in One Man’s Bible but also, more discreetly, in Soul Mountain, and even more discreetly in Requiem for Beauty. Gao’s relationship with history cannot be dissociated from his relationship with memory and, through that, his relationship with writing. Here too Gao intends to carve out his own path and find his own voice, somewhere between politically committed literature and pure formalism or a classical aesthetics that saw itself as ahistorical. He does not intend to serve any cause whatever and does not feel himself to be on any sort of mission—especially not a mission to save the world. But at the same time, he rejects literature that passes itself off as “pure” since he knows very well that purity is an illusion that can only breed a deadly nostalgia and lead politically to various forms of totalitarianism—and it is endless debate over politics and literature that the narrator of One Man’s Bible admits he’s tired of: So let’s just talk about pure literature. But does pure literature really exist? Then let’s talk about literature. But what is literature? These issues are all of relevance to the conference and are all endlessly contested. You’re tired of the debate over literature and politics. China is already so remote from you; moreover, you were expelled from the country so long ago, and you do not need to bear that country’s label. You simply write in the Chinese language, and that’s all.27

32

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

What is clear is that the rejection of characters in the novel does not go as far as their pure and simple negation. Characters, as Gao himself explains, have been preserved not as they existed in the nineteenth-century novel but in a strangely complex mode within the interplay of personal pronouns, “I,” “you,” “he,” and in an even more original way in the pronoun “she.” This tells us to what extent characters, narrator, and author now slot together in a puzzle that Gao never ceases to assemble and disassemble. This dispersal of points of view, which sometimes seems to be taken so far that they become indistinguishable, is the opposite of all dogmatism—and it is indeed dogmatism, whether ideological, philosophical, or artistic, that Gao rejects, though without lapsing into either skepticism or nihilism. Gao’s relationship to memory, and so to the past, is itself complex, because “it’s hard differentiating the dreams from the memories”; the narrator can’t “decide in the end whether it is memory or something you have imagined”; and he isn’t sure memories can be “retold.”28 And then, because the “characters” in his novels, whether the “he” of the past who Gao suggests may well be the author or the familiar “you” of the present who is his “conscious mind,”29 or certain characters who are given names, like Margarethe, memory of whom comes back only on the second-last page of One Man’s Bible, seem to be both prisoners of their past and keen to shake it off—going so far as to refuse to identify with this “self” that “they” (male or female) have been or weren’t able to be, a refusal that the direct opposition between the “you” and the “he” only highlights. This direct opposition needs to be qualified, though. Of course, “you” and “he” or “him” are always distinguished by distance in time, a gap, with the “you” referring to the present and the “he” to the past. And this gap, which every life is marked by but which the history of China has deepened, accentuated, is so great that it refers, in the same movement, to a distance between two characters, the person the narrator was and the person he has become. Gao’s originality here is to assert that no genuine empathy (Einfühlung) is possible between these two states of a self that is precisely not the same—and that is the distinction expressed

Gao Xingjian and Philosophy

33

literally by the pronouns “you” and “he,” a “he” that is indeterminate and perhaps indeterminable, a “he” without a “me,” a self. Identity here seems to be merely a fiction, an effect of language, an assertion that may well be necessary but that merely translates the difficulty of remembering, of any kind of retrieval of time à la Proust. The difficulty, or even futility or impossibility, of remembering is confirmed by That Man in The Man Who Questions Death, with his nod to Spengler: “Once something’s gone, you can’t bring it back. When it’s gone it’s finished. … But then again what is there that’s worth remembering? What you lived through, no matter how beautiful, can’t be relived, and what you missed will only lead to endless regrets ...”30 We could say, then, that this impossibility of empathizing with a different civilization or culture that Spengler underscored in The Decline of the West—but also Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Idea of History, and Malraux in his essays on art—is something Gao posits in relation to man himself, to his own self, the child, the adolescent, and even the adult he was: the foreign or the foreigner, and what we might more aptly call foreignness, is here constitutive of what one no longer dares name the self. The opposition, then, does seem to be direct, and yet Gao would not be the thinker that he is of the “in-between” and of the effort to go beyond antimonies if he had simply stuck to that opposition. For despite the opposition of pronouns, of the “you” and the “he,” which is maintained right to the very last line of One Man’s Bible, the author, that is, Gao, no matter how hard he tries to confuse the issue, never ceases —the novel leaves no doubt—trying to bear witness to a past that broke millions of lives and nearly broke him, too. He has sunk deeper and deeper into that past, despite the different forms of resistance it might have triggered inside him and outside him, to completely free himself from it and overcome it by transforming it through writing into literature, literature that sits between testimony and fiction and is, once again, fully both. This explains the narrator’s serenity at the end of One Man’s Bible: if he has found freedom31 and sings “a hymn to life,”32 this is because he has finally turned the page and is as far as can be from any kind of

34

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

nostalgia, even nostalgia for life as it was before, evoked from the start of the book, whose first chapter begins like this: “It was not that he didn’t remember he once had another sort of life. But … it was sad to think about, and far away, like another world that had disappeared forever.”33 And it ends with the same evocation: “He did have another sort of life, only afterward he simply forgot about it.”34 The whole book lies between that page of history and the movement of turning it; between testimony and fiction, the poet has raised “a China possessed by [himself] alone,”35 which has supposedly allowed him to not be broken by the other China to which he knows he will never return, at least not as a person. The book may well have a timelessness of its own that defies the temporality of the great powers and empires. We can see, through these different snapshots, how complex Gao’s relationship to philosophy is. But, of course, this complexity is at its most philosophical in its relationship to the philosophy of Hegel. The very frequency with which the expression “the negation of negation” occurs in Gao’s oeuvre, and the fact that it is always taken amiss, a veritable caricature in his eyes of vital thinking, clearly shows that it’s not philosophy that Gao is criticizing, not even at bottom the philosophy of Hegel—although, and I will come back to this, things are doubtless not quite so simple—but indeed what was, and often still is, a caricature of that philosophy. What Gao clearly sees in the debased Hegelianism peddled by a certain Marxism is that “the negation of negation,” this relay of canceling and taking up that the dialectic claims to be, ends in a form of modernism that aims to wipe the slate clean of the past, whereas for Gao, as he stresses with as much if not greater force than Malraux or Derrida, there can be no creativity outside what we have inherited from the past. It is only logical that Gao should link to Laozi this potential power that comes from rejecting a dialectics that has become sterile: Laozi’s one gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, and three gives birth to the myriad things is ancient wisdom that can act as a cooling elixir to help people escape the vicious circle of endless revolutions inherent in the negation of negation. To overthrow is

Gao Xingjian and Philosophy

35

not the pattern for the evolution and transformation of things, and the medium between the two is impregnated with mechanisms for producing the myriad things. Freedom of thought is like this, too. Fresh thoughts often are born at the boundary between two things, and the long accumulated history of human culture is the continual discovery of new understanding on the foundations of predecessors. Literary and art creations are also like this.36 I’ve quoted that essay at length because it allows us to grasp immediately how great a misinterpretation of Gao’s oeuvre it would be if we were to amputate its philosophical dimension: after all, at least since Spinoza, philosophy has been bound up with the criticism it performs of the caricatures people have made of it, just as the philosopher is distinct from that false brother that is the sophist—and the sophist is still more of a good likeness than the caricature of philosophy Gao has grappled with. And yet, things are a bit more complex since, in attacking “the negation of negation” like this, Gao not only challenges the debased Hegelianism that held sway in the communist regimes, particularly in the years between 1950 and 1970; he also is in step with a whole swathe of contemporary philosophy. The latter refers to the Hegelian moment, but only to distance itself from it in a bid to escape the totalizing power of Hegelian reason, of what Hegel himself calls the concept—which is “the identical nature of identity and difference.” That definition clearly shows that Hegel’s philosophy is a philosophy of identity, even if it accommodates difference internally as a moment in the concrete identity it claims to be. This act of breaking and entering in relation to the Hegelian concept is the defining gesture of contemporary philosophy, whether in Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, or Jean-Luc Nancy; it has been intensely directed at trying to think the unthinkable, to seize what surpasses the concept, what is strictly resistant to all assimilation and to all reduction to the identical. It is indeed against Hegel that Deleuze puts the essential question, which is also the question Gao puts in his own way: “One might ask whether an ontology of difference couldn’t be created that would not go all the way to contradiction, since contradiction would be less and not

36

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

more than difference.”37 Gao, in his recurring critique of “the negation of negation”—that is, of what is known as “sublation” (after Derrida, and as a way of translating Hegel’s term Aufhebung)—lines up on the side of contemporary philosophy, which has never stopped battling a form of thinking about identity and about totality that it suspects of being totalitarian. The field Gao explores in this reiterated rejection of sublation—and this is the specificity of his approach—is not so much difference in itself, as in Deleuze (or in the Victor Segalen of Essay on Exoticism),38 as this path that runs between differences and is more or less his signature. Gao is aware, furthermore, of this dimension to his work, this attention to exteriority, which he rethinks as an exteriority of the in-between, not only when he insists on the importance of the margins but also when he continues, concretely and consistently throughout his work, to go beyond all established categories and all oppositions. In other words, if the notion of marginality is explicitly championed by Gao in relation to its political and, more generally, social sense, notably in his 2006 conversation with Ōe Kenzaburo,39 then it is also valid, structurally, for his entire oeuvre, whether literary, pictorial, or filmic—because he has never stopped blurring boundaries and genres. I’ve set aside the connections Gao seems to invite us to extrapolate, such as the famous ego sum, ego existo, Descartes’s cogito, which Gao takes up freely in a veritable re-creation of the existential experience defined by This Man: “That’s the truth. You search high and low, it’s the only thing you’ve found, this miracle! You listen, you see, you feel, you taste, and you touch. You are happy yet in pain. Only in the process of muttering can your body and soul be confirmed.”40 In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes had already openly elucidated the “thing that thinks,” but Gao’s evocation, in The Man Who Questions Death, of his consciousness of existing, while being restricted to the time frame of this assertion of existence—the instant or, more precisely, the moment—is a more sensual openness, bearing the stamp of the contemporary world. Gao, though, goes beyond this, for the sentence from The Man Who Questions Death quoted above, “Only in the process of muttering can your

Gao Xingjian and Philosophy

37

body and soul be confirmed,” leads us to sense an “I mutter, therefore I am” that is explicit in his 2008 film After the Flood. “Muttering” is seen there as the root of existence, as if Gao’s use of this word from early childhood and more generally from social marginalization deliberately introduced an ironic distance, at the same time as the tragic tone of an era, in its “reworking” of the Cartesian cogito. Muttering also refers— how can we forget it when it’s what Gao writes?—to the word of the poet that, far removed from all dogmatism, is always at the outer limit of the sayable as original and inaugural talk, muttering. In other words, confirming existence while refusing to oversimplify it, the expression reintroduces history and poetry into the reworking of a theory that remains metaphysical in nature. Gao is not content to philosophize in a token way, either; he bases his philosophizing on what we might call finiteness. The word is not used, but that is indeed what is at issue when he writes in The Man Who Questions Death: “You know that you can’t just become God. So you resort to metaphysics and dabble in philosophy, claiming that ‘You think, therefore you are.’”41 The “So” here points not only to a relationship of logical succession but indeed to one of causal consecution, and it causes the act of philosophizing to be a product of the man’s dawning realization that he can’t take himself for God—not even if he is a creator. It’s true that in this text, which is a play and not a speculative work, Gao follows up those few manifestly philosophical lines with an attack on philosophy itself as an activity that can’t help but lapse into ideology, utopia, or illusion—so many terms that could refer to Kant’s critique of metaphysics as errant reason, every bit as much as to the downward spiral of Marxism Gao was so familiar with. The play, which is well and truly a play and in no way a speculative or didactic exposé, is so permeated with philosophy that, from the outset, This Man can’t stop himself from harking back to the lack that is the origin of both philosophy and the production of art: “In fact, you clearly know that your mind is a total void. You can’t say what’s missing in there, love or lust, but nonetheless you’re tormented beyond words.”42 Gao meets Pascal: “How hollow is the heart of man

38

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

and how full of filth”; Rimbaud too, of course; but also Plato, the Plato who asserts, in The Banquet, that love, Eros, is a philosopher since he is the son of Poros (Expediency) and Penia (Poverty). My aim has been to show how close Gao’s oeuvre is to philosophy, but I owe it to the truth to acknowledge that Gao himself, particularly in his theoretical essays, strives to keep the two domains distinct and even apparently to pit them against each other. This distinction is argued most rigorously in “The Art of Fiction,” and it is only right to take up Gao’s arguments here. After recalling the importance, in fiction, of the interior monologue, Gao is careful to eliminate any confusion: “However, fiction cannot be written up as a work of thought.”43 This is because the fiction writer’s concern is to contextualize his thinking—which thereby accedes to an aesthetic dimension through this very distanciation—as a function of his characters’ emotional states, whereas philosophical reflection is abstract: In manifesting thought, the fiction writer differs from the philosopher because what is related is not strictly rational and at the same time is infused with aesthetics. As far as the fiction writer is concerned, deliberation does not rely on the assertion of maxims and aphorisms. Philosophical deliberations are abstract, without person, and the person deliberating is not confirmed. The fiction writer is exactly the opposite because both deliberation and thought must be induced in a character at a certain time, in a certain place, and when the character is in a particular frame of mind, and this narration constitutes the present action of the character. In other words, the articulation of thought in fiction is not divorced from perception and must constitute a link in the character’s life that unifies perception and thought in the character’s experiences.44 This essay rejects any confusion between literature and philosophy, and on that we can only agree with Gao: it has never been a question of confusing the two approaches, or even of ranking them in a hierarchy as we are often tempted to do—and it may well be just such a hierarchical order that Gao fears, so that he is sometimes driven to turn the hierarchy

Gao Xingjian and Philosophy

39

on its head. Several qualifications are called for, however. The first is that Gao would not pit the two approaches or domains against each other if he were not himself conscious of the philosophical dimension of his oeuvre, which he rightly claims is not a philosophical oeuvre. And he makes this distinction between the fiction writer and the philosopher by looking at things from the preferred ground of the latter: ideal expression. Not only is the aim—knowledge—the same, but also the aimed-for result itself derives, at least in part, from philosophy: to erase the differentiation between the sensible and the intellect. The second qualification that needs to be made concerns the arguments Gao puts forward to establish the distinction between the fiction writer and the philosopher: the aesthetic dimension of fiction and the contrastingly abstract, impersonal, and indeterminate nature of philosophical reflection. These arguments are not debatable, but the whole thing needs to be qualified somewhat, from the philosopher’s point of view. It is not clear that an aesthetic dimension is lacking in philosophical works, including the most arid, just as it is not clear that philosophical deliberation is abstract, impersonal, and indeterminate in relation to knowing who is doing the deliberating. We could say that if that were true once upon a time, it no longer is, and that this is evident in contemporary philosophy, whether in Lyotard, Derrida, or Nancy, and, in a way, just as distinctly in the new generation philosophy, in Jocelyn Benoist or Patrice Maniglier. But we could also say that despite appearances to the contrary and despite the prevailing tendency in history and philosophy, it never has been entirely true. Philosophy is not reducible to logic, or even to reason. And conversely, fiction is not reducible to aesthetics. It is therefore true that “fiction cannot be written up as a work of thought.” But it is also true that works of fiction—Gao’s novels first and foremost—can, without being didactic, have their share of speculative thought. These are just details, of course, and the opposition that Gao reminds us of cannot be denied, but the very way he sets up this opposition shows that it would not be faithful to his thinking to see it as merely an antimony, even if he has never ceased to

40

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

construct an oeuvre, whether theoretical, poetic, novelistic, pictorial, or filmic, that endeavors to embrace a philosophical dimension. Translated from the French by Julie Rose

Gao Xingjian and Philosophy

41

Notes 1. Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain, trans. Mabel Lee (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2004), 498–499. 2. Gao, One Man’s Bible, trans. Mabel Lee (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2004), 446. 3. Ibid., 438. 4. Ibid., 438. 5. Ibid., 443–444. 6. Ibid., 405. 7. Gao Xingjian, The Man Who Questions Death, in Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2007), 82. 8. Gao, One Man’s Bible, 405. 9. Gao, Soul Mountain, 349. 10. Ibid., 275. 11. Ibid., 171. 12. Ibid., 109. 13. Ibid., 309. 14. Gao, One Man’s Bible, 444. 15. Gao Xingjian, “The Aesthetics of the Artist,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), 65–87. 16. Gao, “The Aesthetics of the Artist,” section 2, 71. 17. Ibid., sections 3 and 4, 73–74. 18. Gao, The Man Who Questions Death, 81. 19. Gao, One Man’s Bible, 410. 20. Gao Xingjian, “The Art of Fiction,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, 21– 40; 34. 21. Gao, One Man’s Bible, 419. 22. Ibid., 419–420. 23. Ibid., 420. 24. Gao, “The Art of Fiction,” 28–29. 25. Ibid., 30. 26. Ibid. 27. Gao, One Man’s Bible, 296. 28. Ibid., 295. 29. Ibid., 440.

42

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Gao, The Man Who Questions Death, 95–96. Gao, One Man’s Bible, 444. Ibid., 446. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 443. Gao Xingjian, “Freedom and Literature,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, 227–235; 233. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Mike Taormina (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2004), 18. Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity, ed. and trans. Yaël Rachel Schlick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Gao Xingjian, “Dialogue entre Ōe Kenzaburo et Gao Xingjian,” in De la création (Paris: Seuil, 2013), 307–323. This conversation took place in a public forum in Aix-en-Provence in 2006 and was conducted in French; the transcript has not been translated into English.—Julie Rose Gao, The Man Who Questions Death, 103. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 86. Gao, “The Art of Fiction,” 36. Ibid., 37.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Chapter 3

Gao Xingjian: Exemplifying a Renaissance in Today’s World Liu Zaifu

When I said some twenty years ago that Gao Xingjian was not just a writer but a great writer, people were dubious; then when I next said he was also a thinker, people again were dubious. Nonetheless I have continued to consolidate my own understanding of him. Last year when he and I were on stage in public conversation at Hong Kong Science and Technology University I said that I admired Gao Xingjian not because he had won the Nobel Prize and countless other honors and awards, but because he was a thinker. His writings have moved and startled me, but they have also enlightened me. There are many writers who have moved me with their writings, but none has ever enlightened me as Gao

44

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Xingjian has; because of him, some of my literary ideas and modes of thinking began changing. Soon I was writing irrepressibly about Gao Xingjian, so that by 2004 my collected essays formed a 360-page book, On Gao Xingjian (2004), and I thought that the book would bring a small conclusion to my understanding of Gao Xingjian. However, it did not occur to me that Gao Xingjian would continue charging ahead, nonstop creating in the multiple fields of theory, painting, film, and poetry, and producing many outcomes. On the other hand, my understanding of him also deepened, and while reflecting on his works I continued to be enlightened. I continued writing about Gao Xingjian, and in the decade or so between 2004 and now I have presented eight lectures in France, Germany, South Korea, and Hong Kong, and written more than twenty essays. Today I completed another collection that I have titled On Gao Xingjian Again (2016). His erudition and intellectual acumen excite me, and there are all the time new things to say. In this essay I have written for my preface, I summarize Gao Xingjian’s discoveries in the broad field of the humanities, and I maintain that these represent discoveries about human knowledge. I read “Gao Xingjian and Philosophy” by the French philosopher JeanPierre Zarader when it was published in the supplement of the May 2015 issue of the Hong Kong magazine Ming Pao Monthly. Professor Zarader is the author of Petite histoire des idées philosophiques (1994) and both author and editor of Le Vocabulaire des philosophes in five volumes (2002, pocket edition 2016). He is a well-known French historian of philosophy and art. When I read his essay, it resonated deeply with me, and I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. Early the following morning I wrote a WeChat message to Pan Shuyang, a PhD student of Chinese Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. I said I couldn’t sleep all night because a French philosopher had written about my special understanding of Gao Xingjian. According to him: Gao Xingjian does not think of himself as a philosopher, and he is unwilling to be a philosopher, yet he is all the time engaged

Exemplifying a Renaissance in Today’s World

45

in philosophical deliberations, and his works have philosophical layers that can’t be eliminated. Whether as novelist, dramatist, or cinematic artist (not to mention painter), Gao Xingjian shows that philosophy is present in his works, it is hard to understand, at times hard to detect, but it is always present. Zarader put it superbly. As a philosopher, he confirms that Gao Xingjian’s works are infused with philosophy by saying that philosophy is always present, and yet it is not philosophy. In other words, Gao Xingjian’s works are genuine works of literature or art and while being aesthetically rich, they are also philosophically rich. I wanted to say this a long time ago, but Zarader has beaten me to it. However, there is more to be said: Gao Xingjian’s nonphilosophical creations are highly philosophical because they are permeated with ideas, moreover, great ideas. And these ideas derive from his unique cognition of the world, society, human life, aesthetics, and art. This cognition is drenched with philosophical implications, but it is not a philosophical stance. His richly philosophical understanding is the intellectual stance of the writer or artist; it is an understanding that has fused with literature and art, not the intellectual stance of the philosopher. There are precedents in literature and art, for example Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; none had the metaphysical philosophy of Plato or Kant, but they had a philosophical understanding of human beings who were made of flesh and blood and breathed. I prefer to think of the philosophy in Gao Xingjian’s literature and art as ponderings, like those in the works of Dante, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, that likewise are ponderings on human existence. Philosophers like Plato and Kant confront an abstract human existence, whereas the existence confronted by the likes of Dante and Shakespeare is a concrete human existence. Gao Xingjian’s thinking is that of an individual who is fully engrossed with life, and he also has a greatness of mind that has led to significant discoveries in the humanities.

46

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

To begin with, he discovered the “modern stupidity” of the twentieth century, that is, the stupidity of letting “isms” or political ideology hold one hostage and dictate one’s thoughts and actions. In the twentieth century, political ideology enveloped everything, including literature and the arts. Gao Xingjian discovered that this political ideology came from three directions: leftist pan-Marxism, rightist liberalism, and “old morality.” Gao Xingjian’s book Without Isms may be regarded as his farewell to all twentieth-century mainstream ideologies. The book was part of the Literary China Series of which I was editor, so before publication I had to scrutinize the manuscript. Reading it, I became very excited: finally, someone had shouted “No!” for the first time in the world to the demon curses that had essentially blockaded literature. At the time, I felt it was the beginning of the “liberation” of contemporary literature. Gao Xingjian was saying farewell to an era inundated with all sorts of isms. His manuscript was not just footsteps in an empty valley: it was bringing enlightenment to people. At the time, I became aware that Gao Xingjian was not just a writer and an artist but also a thinker, that at least it could be said he had achieved the height and profundity of a thinker. His collection Without Isms was produced in the early 1990s, just after he had finished his novel Soul Mountain. It was apparent that “without isms” was the starting point of his thinking and creation. When I finished reading the manuscript I wrote to Mr. Liu Wenliang, the manager of Cosmos Book Company, Hong Kong, the publisher of my series. I told him that the book was unique: “It will not necessarily be a good seller, but the thinking is epochal. Previously our writers and poets always acknowledged a system or a framework for literature, but this book rejects the usual rules and all systems or frameworks, rejects ideologies, and opens up a separate path for lucid thinking.” I was serious when I went on to say that, while not having “isms,” it was certainly a work that was not short of ideas: it presented many new ways of thinking. Many new words were articulated, but they were not empty words, and they were aimed at powerful historical targets: the ideological mysteries of the twentieth century. Gao interrogated the utopias with

Exemplifying a Renaissance in Today’s World

47

their new people who would reform the world and reconstruct society, and in attitude and thinking he was clear and penetrating. On hearing my comments, Liu Wenliang said: “Then publish the book. It could be said that it is speaking the words of one great litterateur.” I corrected him: “They are the words of the great litterateur, but without doubt no one has ever spoken them before. This is the very first time they have been spoken.” “Without isms” was Gao Xingjian’s first discovery in the humanities, and he made it soon after relocating abroad. His second discovery was that the hell of the self was a hell even harder to break out of. His play Escape, which he wrote not long after leaving China, presents this very topic. When the play was published, the authorities called him “reactionary” while the other side claimed that he “had defamed the democracy movement.” Both sides regarded it as a political play, but in fact it was a philosophical play. The philosophical content is prominent. He had overturned Sartre’s “Hell is other people!” arguing that it is the self that is always hell. His point was: While fleeing actual politics and other people’s oppression, if one fails to pay attention to the chaotic self in it all, the self can also constitute hell, and this is precisely the universal ailment of contemporary people. This sort of introspection can be regarded as an extension of soberly “getting rid of the self’s control” and is given a full degree of modern expression in his subsequent plays Between Life and Death and Nocturnal Wanderer. Gao Xingjian has seized upon Nietzsche and criticized him several times because Nietzsche’s philosophy is incapable of warning people to be careful of “the hell of the self,” and moreover it created countless romantic selves and inflated selves during the twentieth century. These mini-Nietzsches descended into the hell of Nietzsche’s Superman, but took many others with them into that hell of reckless talk and action. Eugene O’Neill was significant in theater history for raising the issues of “man and God,” “man and nature,” “man and society,” and “man and others,” and it may be said that Gao Xingjian raised a fifth issue, that of

48

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

“man and self.” However, in terms of intellectual history, while tracking Sartre’s “Hell is other people,” Gao Xingjian made a profound discovery: for a person without a clear knowledge of the self, the self likewise can constitute hell. In Soul Mountain, where Gao Xingjian sets up the three intrinsic subjective coordinates “I, you, he,” “he” is a third eye for scrutinizing “you” and “I”; this is an artistic discovery for the writing of “cold literature.” He often says that only self-scrutiny with this eye can be dispassionate. All his writings make use of this so-called third eye, an intelligent eye that is dispassionate and lucid, to focus on the multitudes of the human world while at the same time scrutinizing his own chaotic self; he discards the tenet of using literature to save the world and debunks modern myths about Nietzsche’s Supermen and saviors. Awareness and consciousness result from this sort of scrutiny, and that is the premise of Gao Xingjian’s theory of knowledge. After bidding farewell to “isms” and the romanticized self, Gao Xingjian made a third discovery in the humanities: the “frail individual.” A decade or so after he received the Nobel Prize, he was also awarded the French Renaissance Gold Medal. I have always regarded this close friend of mine as a “Renaissance”-style person, a wonderful character richly endowed with talent and ability, as well as an all-around fully developed personality. Gao Xingjian says that he was calling for a “Renaissance,” but that it was different from the idea of the Renaissance era’s old humanism. For the pioneers of the Renaissance, the idea of man was “MAN” written in capital letters, remarkable man, man who was the essence of Heaven and Earth, and the spiritual leader of all creation. However, Gao Xingjian’s “man” is written in small letters and is frail, a man with all sorts of human weaknesses, and could be called ordinary man, common man, man full of human weaknesses and anxieties. This was Gao Xingjian’s new view of the humanities. All the great cultures of the world have their own view of the humanities, and Gao Xingjian repeatedly expresses the crux

Exemplifying a Renaissance in Today’s World

49

of his: i.e., that it is concerned with authentic man during struggles and traumas in life. The authentic individual is frail: this is his judgment. Last autumn, during a conversation, he said several times that we cannot halt at the healthy and perfect ideal man of old humanism. It would be preferable for us to move toward the actual individual from ideas about people, so that there are authentic people with all sorts of weaknesses. Such people are precisely those who emerge in Gao Xingjian’s writings and discussions. He has left the hollow political language of humanism and human rights and is speaking purely in the voice of the individual to address individuals under various social constraints. Just like the bookish protagonist of One Man’s Bible, who turned into a beam-hopping clown immediately after the revolutionary tempest descended, time and again he failed in reality’s predicaments, spent his days in abject fear, and fled before danger befell him. Frail people confronting existential predicaments confront life, confront real people’s instincts. Therefore, Gao Xingjian’s fiction, plays, and films all confront this lively, rich, and complex person and never make simplistic political and moral judgments. He only makes aesthetic judgments about human nature and human emotions. Gao Xingjian is the earliest contemporary Chinese writer to realize that he did not have a mission to reform or save the world. He simply announced that he did not play the role of magistrate, prophet, religious leader, or savior and the like, and that he only provided readers with his understanding of the world and human nature. He queried but was not pessimistic, was uncertain but did not weary of the world; he was lucid and not negative. Human nature, human existence, and the conditions of human existence have always been like this: human tragedy, comedy, and farce too have always been like this, so there is no need to be shocked or create a fuss. Starting from Greece 2,500 years ago, the world and humankind have been like this. It was because of one beautiful woman that the Trojan War of the Iliad saw slaughter that became rivers of blood, and there was never talk of justice. The heroes of the two rival camps were killed or wounded, and in fact

50

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

were also very frail. Gao Xingjian’s new spirit of the humanities was a new discovery about the humanities. He used his own creations to explain that humans were neither immortals nor good gods. The world is basically absurd, and humankind since ancient times has been greedy and consumed by lustful thoughts. However, literature can try to discern what is human reality in survival predicaments, and by so doing awaken people. Gao Xingjian’s repeated explanations and presentations of the “frail individual” are precisely a deepening of the Renaissance tradition to achieve a better understanding of humans and society. Gao Xingjian also made a fourth important humanities discovery. He discovered that between two opposite poles there was a third broad space, which could be called a “third zone.” With this discovery, his paintings found a broad but previously undetected region lying between figurative and abstract, where he found enormous possibilities for developing new art images. Gao Xingjian’s creations include fiction, plays, operas, dance librettos, poetry, paintings, and film, as well as relevant aesthetic discussions on each of these. His continuing innovations in expressive forms in literature and art are all related to his discovery of this third zone. For example, in fiction, pronouns replace characters with names: the same character relying on the three pronouns I, you, and he replaces the plot with thoughts and the flow of language from different angles. The result is a completely new method of narration. In the polyphonic and multiple-pronoun dramaturgy of his plays, the same character relies on the pronouns you and I to construct a false dialogue that is a real monologue, and this was without precedent on any world stage. He advocated tripartite performance in theater for the first time, and his acknowledging the status of the neutral actor in between the actor and the role suggested new possibilities for playwriting and performance that are reflected in his scripts and in his play directing. His painting lies between figurative and abstract, and resorts to prompts to and hints at a body of intangible yet extremely rich images of the inner mind. His cine-poems merge arts that are based on sound and image into what he denotes “tripartite film,” in which sound, painting, and language are

Exemplifying a Renaissance in Today’s World

51

relatively independent and contrastive. This is a break from the usual narrative mold in which the image directs. As free as in the writing of poetry and informed by the polyphonic construction of music, his plays, dance, music, poetry, and painting are fused together in the same furnace to become a “total art.” Gao Xingjian’s discovery of the third zone brought him a broad spatial expanse to explore, but this was not a chance discovery. At the beginning of the 1980s, he proceeded to interrogate and question the philosophy of “one divides into two” that our generation universally accepted. Using doubt as the starting point of knowledge, he rejected the a priori spirit of absolutism and ultimate ontological premises, as well as various fixed systems of values, although this did not result in nihilism. He used cognition theory to replace ontological theory and repeatedly emphasized cognition, hence departing from Hegelian dialectics and the negation and overturning of tradition that was rampant during the twentieth century. However, he did not sever cultural traditions and on the foundation of knowledge achieved by his predecessors, using his predecessors as references, he went forth to deepen and explore new knowledge. He rejected the modern universally popular opposition of dualities, that something is either this or that. He was enlightened by Laozi’s “one gives rise to two, two gives rise to three, three gives rise to the myriad things” and by Huineng’s “the one and only Way.” Between the two he cleaved a broad territory for cognition and for new expressive possibilities that he entrusted to literary and art creation. Zarader put it well: “Gao Xingjian will transcend two contradictory laws, and use a more precise method to deliberate on what lies between the two. In his creations, he continually transcends boundaries, and in a concrete and practical manner, he transcends all opposites and patterns.” Zarader has a thorough knowledge of European philosophy, and of course recognized that the philosophy manifested in Gao Xingjian’s work was unlike what he was familiar with, so it was with much pleasure

52

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

that he wrote the excellent essay that took everyone by surprise, “Gao Xingjian and Philosophy.” (See chapter 1 of the present book.) I also want to add that Gao Xingjian made fifth and sixth humanities discoveries. He discovered the epochal disease in Western art thinking: the postmodernist disease of replacing aesthetics with concepts and replacing art with preaching. Drawing a clear demarcation line, he rejected new dogmas such as “modernity.” He was the first in the world to recognize this problem. His collected essays, Another Kind of Aesthetics, written at the end of the last century, and his play The Man Who Questions Death are declarations targeting this disease of the times. These two works are harsh indictments of contemporary art and postmodernist pronouncements that also unearth their ideological origins as floods introduced by ideology. Globalization came to the East from the West, and this epochal disease had not only just arrived but also been spreading all over the world for some time. It had committed beauty and art to the grave. The film Requiem for Beauty that he composed and directed was completed last year and is a dirge to the decimation of beauty all over the world in present times. While grieving the loss of beauty, he calls for another Renaissance. Of even greater significance is the profound thinking that informs returning to the investigation of beauty: it is returning to the human; returning to the wealth, complexities, and subtleties of human nature; returning to cognition; awakening the senses; once again searching for spiritual levels and entrusting one’s search to one’s creations. Last year during a lecture, I screened the National Theatre rock ’n’ roll performance of Gao Xingjian’s Of Mountains and Seas that had been filmed by National Taiwan Normal University. Gao Xingjian had searched for a lost system of myths from fragments of the ancient text Classic of Mountains and Seas, and re-created the text by writing a historical epic opera of stunning scale about the Huaxia people of ancient antiquity. He also wrote his novel One Man’s Bible on the Cultural Revolution, a catastrophe that is unprecedented in human history. His film epic

Exemplifying a Renaissance in Today’s World

53

Requiem for Beauty grieves for the loss of beauty in the contemporary world, and at the same time is an appeal for another Renaissance. At this point, looking back on Gao Xingjian’s humanities discoveries and his literary and art creations, it suddenly occurred to me that these in fact represent concrete evidence of a worldwide Renaissance. “In dreams, I seek him countless times, then when I suddenly turn, he is in the light by the railing.” It was my friend, the friend I have chatted intimately with from Beijing to Paris, the friend who is not very tall and used to be always smoking, the friend who thirty years ago carried my daughter into the People’s Art Theatre in Beijing to see his play Bus Stop, who was a Renaissance-style character. While lecturing at Hanyang University in Korea in 2012, I had in mind the novelist Gao Xingjian, the playwright Gao Xingjian, the theorist Gao Xingjian, and the artist Gao Xingjian. Afterward, I viewed his three cine-poems and wrote the preface for his poetry collection: his genuine well-roundedness makes him a representative Renaissance-style character. When I called Gao Xingjian a great writer and thinker, people queried me. Today when I say Gao Xingjian is one of those rare Renaissance-style personalities of the world, will people also query me? Of course, Gao Xingjian’s achievements in multiple domains are his own personal Renaissance, not an epochal Renaissance. However, this to some extent explains that, while beauty has been vanquished, provided writers and artists are adequately aware and acknowledge the necessity and possibility for a Renaissance, there are things that can be done. Although the vast world is noisy and chaotic, human lust is rampant, and a frail individual life has its limitations, they can still leave behind creations of spiritual value for later generations. Translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee

Chapter 4

An Insignificant Individual’s Defiance Gao Xingjian’s The Man Who Questions Death Ming Jian “Writing is to defy death.”1 This statement by Gao Xingjian brings to the fore the significance of death in his artistic creation and aesthetic thinking. His works reveal an acute awareness of human finitude and anxiety about death, which heightens his sensitivity to the predicament of human existence and challenges him to examine his life. The theme of death, which transcends cultural and national boundaries, runs the gamut in his works from the theoretical to the practical, from the fictional to the factual, and from the general to the personal. Aging and his neardeath experience further intensified his preoccupation with the theme of death, which culminates in his play The Man Who Questions Death.

56

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

The Absurdity of Human Existence, Anxiety about Death, and the Response of a Fragile Individual Gao Xingjian prefers to “understand the world and the human self through aesthetic judgment and artistic creation rather than philosophical speculation.”2 A case in point is the play The Man Who Questions Death, which dramatizes his philosophical views on death. A wide array of philosophical questions on death and the broad perspective of the playwright find their theatrical expression in this play, which is in fact a monologue, nevertheless performed by two characters—the title character, This Man, and his alter ego, That Man—in a quasi-dialogue format. This is a theatrical technique Gao Xingjian often employs to dramatize the character/playwright’s thoughts and feelings in the form of stage performance. Gao Xingjian refers to the play as a “contemporary parable”3 that vividly illustrates the absurdity of life in today’s world. This Man, a casual visitor to a modern art museum, finds himself locked inside. A high-tech security camera system scans every corner of the museum but, surreally, fails to notice this trapped visitor trying desperately to gain someone’s attention. Unable to free himself, he is “like a fly caught inside a glass window case,” and he ends up killing himself in the exhibition hall. “Ridiculous, wasn’t it?” This Man asks rhetorically.4 Indeed! A startling truth is revealed by this simple story: “Absurdity … is the true state of human existence.”5 There is no possible explanation and no justification to support what happens to This Man, who represents modern human beings trapped in an incomprehensible world subject to illogical and absurd random occurrences. It is no accident that this Kafkaesque event happens in an art museum. Gao Xingjian intentionally chooses this scene to expose the crisis of contemporary art caused by artistic revolutions, globalization, and commercialization. If exhibits such as urinals, cigarette butts, garbage cans, and used sanitary napkins represent absurdity in the arts, the

An Insignificant Individual’s Defiance

57

rantings of the two paranoid characters later in the play are farcical descriptions of the absurd real world we are living in: Let a cowboy become God! … Let all this turn into an advertisement! … Let our Earth be polluted all the way! … Let all the genes of all the races mutate! Let all the weak die off one by one!6 This is a world without God, completely commercialized, devastatingly polluted, threatened by genetic engineering, and dominated by the rich and powerful. Adding to this absurdity is the existential anxiety concerning fate and death. “It is all in your destiny.”7 This Man’s alter ego tells him that what happened to him is inescapable, expressing anxiety about the fact that we live in a contingent existence and are susceptible to random events. And death is even worse: “Death: it is the worst of the worst,” That Man states, “the lowest of the low.”8 What makes death worse and us particularly anxious about it is twofold. First, we are aware of what our physical extinction implies: we will “fall into the Big Void, ending up in nothingness.” Second, we know that we are going to die: “What’s absolutely certain is that you’ll have to die sooner or later.” In the face of mortality and the absurdity of life, That Man asks an existential question: “What incentive is there to live on?”9 This Man rejects some common responses to absurdity and mortality. He repeatedly brings up and acknowledges Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead and claims that “there’s absolutely nothing on the other shore,”10 which effectively repudiates the idea of replacing the fear of death with the hope of heaven. He explicitly disapproves of despair and defeatism but candidly admits his fear and terror about death, which is in stark contrast to the sentimental Romantic idealization that considers death to be the escape to the ideal state and a return to the true source of life. Instead of adopting an attitude of resignation or an escapist approach, he chooses to face up to the absurdity and to defy humanity’s finitude and inevitable nonbeing.

58

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

This Man’s defiance of death is nevertheless antiheroic and merely the resistance of a fragile and insignificant individual. As such, it is distinctly different from the heroic approach to life advocated by Nietzsche, Maoist China, or the Chinese democracy movement. When This Man teases himself with sly humor, “you may not qualify to be a hero,” he is mocking such heroism. With his claim that “you’ve never been a hero, you’ve never fought for the masses,”11 he not only makes clear that his defiance is carried out individually but also reiterates Gao Xingjian’s objection to the kind of heroism passionately promoted by Young Man in his play Escape. In that play Young Man, speaking for the Chinese democracy movement in 1989, advocates as our moral duty self-sacrifice for the country, the people, and freedom. Gao Xingjian categorically rejects Young Man’s heroic stance for the collective, because he firmly believes in living for life itself, instead of for some bigger, better, other cause. He also objects to what Marcuse terms the “idealistic glorification of death,” that is, that society and the state effectively control an individual’s death and devalue individual life by encouraging people to “sacrifice themselves” to advance the common good or “the supreme good.”12 In his novel One Man’s Bible, Gao Xingjian teases Lei Feng, arguably the most famous model hero in Maoist China, “who … selflessly saved others and sacrificed his own life” because he had been completely brainwashed by the state, “not knowing what it was to be an individual.”13 The Man Who Questions Death also repeatedly mocks the kind of hero represented by Nietzschean supermen, who, as This Man taunts, try to “overthrow God, take his place, and be the Creator.” Gao Xingjian denounces Nietzschean supermen for their illusory self-exaggeration and their presumptuous sense of mission to transform the world, which finds expression in This Man’s succinct criticism: “They’ve brought ruin everywhere.”14 Instead, he urges writers to return from self-delusion to reality, that is, to abandon trying to be a creator, savior, or Superman and instead revert to being a frail individual. The reality, Gao Xingjian believes, is that humans are insignificant, fragile, weak, and helpless, which strikes a chord with existentialist and Daoist philosophy. This

An Insignificant Individual’s Defiance

59

Man likens an individual to a small piece of paper drifting in the air and a tiny coin that hardly makes a sound when it falls to the ground.15 Indeed, the overpowering state apparatus embodied in the play by the absurd art museum leaves This Man feeling weak and fragile; unpredictable and uncontrollable human fate leaves him feeling helpless; living in the enormous universe and infinite time makes him feel insignificant; and “Everybody is scared in the face of death.”16 As an insignificant and fragile individual, This Man says he consciously stays far away from power, from the masses, and from the center. Unlike the defiant heroic confrontations in Greek tragedy favored by Nietzsche, This Man’s defiance is expressed by toying with death through self-killing in a black comedy.

Self-Killing as a Token of Freedom and Defiance Albert Camus famously asserted: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”17 To understand Gao Xingjian’s views on death, it is also important to probe his view on suicide, which is brought into focus by This Man’s self-killing in The Man Who Questions Death. Camus, whose absurdist views can be clearly felt in this play, sees suicide as resignation and a cowardly rejection of human freedom. Gao Xingjian, however, takes a more nuanced stand by making a distinction through the title character in the play between suicide and “finishing oneself off” and insisting that This Man’s act of self-destruction is the latter: This isn’t suicide because you finish him off yourself! The difference is: When someone commits suicide, he’s hopeless and he gives himself up for lost; when someone finishes himself off, he is very much aware—he holds death in his own hand, he is at peace, and he’s happy as he puts an end to his own life.18 Here he is in fact talking about two different kinds of suicide, highlighting its complexity, which has historically raised a host of philosophical and psychological questions. Much like Camus, This Man has a view on

60

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

suicide with strong negative moral connotations that signals resignation, self-denial, and defeatism. By contrast, his perception of “finishing himself off” argues for moral and rational justifications for voluntarily ending one’s own life. This Man sees his decision to kill himself as an autonomous personal choice and the exercise of his individual freedom. “Man is not free as long as death has not become really ‘his own,’” Marcuse wrote, “that is, as long as it has not been brought under his autonomy.”19 To bring death under one’s autonomy is, for Marcuse, to free oneself from the manipulation of the state and society, which is the point Gao Xingjian makes with Lei Feng’s story, but also, for Gao Xingjian/This Man, to have the right to end one’s life and to affirm one’s ontological freedom in the Sartrean sense. Unlike the world that is “unknowing,” This Man argues, humans are creatures who are “self-aware.” Because of our consciousness we are free and enjoy the freedom to choose either to resist or to acquiesce in the face of the human predicament. With this freedom comes responsibility for structuring one’s own life. This Man sees his own self-killing as carrying out this responsibility, while the type of suicide he describes is to simply give up and abandon such responsibility. This Man believes that suicide is driven by despair; hence, it is irrational, as excessive emotional distress impairs one’s ability to make rational decisions. By contrast, his self-killing is a rational action. When he kills himself, he is emotionally calm, happy, and at peace, fully aware of the consequences. Gao Xingjian makes clear in his works that the key factor to determine whether a suicide, or a death in general, is rational is: is one better off dead? And whether you are better off dead depends on whether you, as That Man puts it, “end your life at the right time.”20 When, then, is the right time to interrupt the process of one’s own natural life? The play suggests that it is when one can no longer physically live decently and with dignity, which is the case for This Man before he kills himself. He is described as suffering from a debilitating physical condition: “You run out of breath when you walk, you’re shrinking bit

An Insignificant Individual’s Defiance

61

by bit.” He feels like “a withered corpse before it rots … just as good as dead,” and has thus “forfeited all the dignity of being human.”21 In this situation, This Man is better off dead, which makes his self-killing a rational act. This attitude is strongly echoed in Gao Xingjian’s novel One Man’s Bible, in which the male narrator/author, after witnessing his grandfather’s death, becomes convinced that one should not simply let the natural process of organic life run its course. When his grandfather died, he was at an advanced age and had been paralyzed for some time. The narrator recalls, “He thought the old man should have died much earlier.”22 While he regrets that his grandfather died too late, he is agonized by the fact that his mother, who accidentally drowned and “died in the prime of life, at the age of thirty-eight, died too early.”23 Such a premature death interrupted a youthful existence and precluded the possibility of a beautiful life ahead. We might not be able to avoid dying too early, but we can choose not to die too late. This Man tells himself: “Don’t wait until you’ve lost your senses and control over your body. Put a speedy end to your misery while there’s still time!”24 His self-killing is to choose to die “at the right time,” that is, to avoid dragging out his feeble existence and losing control over his own body and senses, which devalues human existence and degrades human dignity. In other words, it is the desire to die in good time to affirm oneself and preserve one’s dignity. In this sense, This Man’s selfkilling is not hostile to life and devaluing existence, but is instead an act that affirms and values a life with dignity, affirms his free choice, and carries out his responsibility for constructing his own life.

Living in the Moment: Time, Literature, and Death Another serious philosophical question related to death that is raised in the play is how to make sense of human existence in terms of time. The discussions about aging, past memory, the unrepeatable nature of life, and the concept of living in the moment all point to an acute sense and

62

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

inner experience of time: living in the moment informs Gao Xingjian’s approach to life and his defiance of death. This Man is constantly reminded that he is aging: “You’re getting older by the day; you can’t turn back the clock.”25 This aging process is clearly described by That Man as the passing of time that flows irreversibly toward death and is blamed for the decline and loss of his mental and physical qualities: being out of breath, his numbed senses, his shrinking body, and his failing organs. Gao Xingjian’s own aging has intensified his sense of human vulnerability and mortality and finds expression in this play. But he resolutely refuses to live his life either backward, dwelling in remembrance of the past, which he likens to “a slow suicide,” or forward in anticipation of the future. Instead he declares: “You live for today.”26 “Enlightened” by Huineng, whom he credits with “turning ‘the present moment’ into the foundation of Chan Buddhism,” Gao Xingjian takes the Chan Buddhist view that defines human existence as a concrete temporalization and insists on living in the moment, or living in “zero time.” This Chan zero time is not a linear progression but an integrated living time, in which there is no distinction between past, present, and future. Based on this concept, Gao Xingjian sees time as the everflowing stream of the present, which leads him to focus his life and fundamental interest in the moment instead of on successive or linear time—the memory of the past and the anticipation of the future. Such an understanding of time alleviates anxiety about death by making every instant count and by helping one enjoy every moment of life, living to the full. “Living in the moment” as the expression of Gao Xingjian’s philosophical and aesthetic understanding of time, life, and literature is perceptively illustrated in the following metaphor-charged dialogue: That Man: But you’ve never been able to get a grip on yourself. That’s the story of your life, isn’t it? Like a monkey trying to catch the moon in the water—

An Insignificant Individual’s Defiance

63

This Man: Listen! Even if the water turns out to be a muddy puddle, imagine how wonderful you’d feel the moment you bend down and try to catch the moon! That Man: But you would only grasp a handful of dirty sludge. This Man: It doesn’t matter. What matters is the pose! When you try to catch the moon, you actually aren’t sure what you’re going to catch. The fun part is the aesthetic pleasure you’re looking for!27 This Man’s life is compared to catching the moon in the water, and the moon symbolizes, among other things (e.g., self, identity), life’s ultimate goal that This Man has persistently tried to get a grip on, but that is just as illusory as the moon in the water. That Man sees such a life and act as a total failure because the hoped-for outcome has not been achieved, whether it is catching the moon or finding life’s ultimate goal or self. According to this teleological intentionality, an activity is of value only as a means to the goal, and success is achieving the hoped-for outcome. By contrast, This Man believes that life and life’s activities have a value of their own. When he bends down and tries to catch the moon, his fundamental interest and focus is not the goal or whether he can grasp the moon but the act itself, without any attachment to or even any thought of the possible reward or goal, which is now completely immersed in the present action. He states that in life’s activities, one often does not know whether the goal can be achieved. Nevertheless, even if he ends up grasping only dirty sludge instead of the moon, he will still enjoy every moment of his action. In this sense, focusing on and enjoying the process of present activity becomes more important than the result. This approach to life’s activities underpins Gao Xingjian’s writing and understanding of literature. Thus, he asserts: “The eternal present and the affirmation of individual life constitute the absolute reason why literature is literature.”28 A writer’s “eternal present” is always to live in the moment of writing and to become “so engrossed in writing that one forgets why one is writing and for whom one is writing.”29 This view

64

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

reflects Gao Xingjian’s fundamental understanding of the nonutilitarian nature of literature and affirms the value of writing itself. What makes a futile act like catching the moon in the water valuable, fun, and wonderful is that it brings “aesthetic pleasure,” which reminds us of Kantian disinterested pleasure. Likewise, Gao Xingjian claims, it is impossible for humans to overcome “the threat of death to life … in real life,” but we can turn it into an aesthetic experience in literature, in which “such impossibility itself brings aesthetic pleasure.”30 Gao Xingjian holds an ontological/existentialist aesthetic view, according to which the fundamental aim of literature and art is to reveal the truth of reality and the human condition; and death is a basic human condition. He asserts that “Literature is a universal observation on the dilemma of human existence” and “literature testifies to human existence.”31 Theater is Gao Xingjian’s preferred art form for fulfilling this function of observation and revelation, partly because it has such unique aesthetic functions to entertain and awaken audiences to “the predicament of modern human beings.”32 He expects that his play The Man Who Questions Death will reveal, through “aesthetic judgement,” the true predicament of human existence and so create a sense of catharsis.33 Gao Xingjian’s aesthetic view and philosophy of death not only inform The Man Who Questions Death but also dictate its artistic form—a black comedy or “black humor,” which he terms “the aesthetic judgment of modern humans.”34 With this aesthetic judgement he approaches death with irony and playfulness instead of heroism and despair. His way of toying with death in the play is to stage his self-killing as a farce. “You’re toying with death before its sudden arrival,” This Man declares, “as if you were directing a play—to put it succinctly, a farce.”35 It is indeed farcical that This Man enjoys la petite mort, a sexual euphoric sensation, while he is killing himself. It is truly an embittered humor and morbid irony that he feels he is climbing up on top of his life when in fact he is climbing up on top of a garbage can to hang himself. Using black humor to make light of death enables Gao Xingjian to examine such a ghoulish topic with “cold

An Insignificant Individual’s Defiance

65

detachment,” which provokes “doubt and introspection” but also “purifies life” and arouses “feelings of concern for and love of life.”36 Here Gao Xingjian uses farcical elements in a Bakhtinian carnivalesque way, that is, he uses coarse words, exaggeration, satire, and even social and political transgression to assert human freedom and the liberation of the human spirit. With This Man’s farcical self-killing, Gao Xingjian illustrates his preferred way of defying death as an insignificant modern individual.

Conclusion: Meaningless Defiance as a Meaningful Stance We are fragile and insignificant creatures in the face of the absurd world and inescapable human finitude, which creates frustration, pessimism, and skepticism. Nevertheless, this predicament of our human existence need not, as Gao Xingjian says, lead to despair and fatalism. Instead he believes that “man needs to be defiant towards death”37 by taking fate into one’s own hands and freely choosing how to live and when to die. Such defiance by a frail individual will change neither the world nor human fate but is, after all, a meaningful stance, because it “takes pride in humanity,”38 salvages human dignity, and affirms one’s own existence. “What matters is the pose!” This Man’s statement echoes the words of Sleepwalker in Gao Xingjian’s play Nocturnal Wanderer: “Your meaningless resistance against this meaningless world more or less proves your meaningless existence.”39

66

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Notes 1. Gao, “On Writing Literature,” in Gao Xingjian, Without Isms (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 2000), 43. 2. Gao Xingjian and Fang Zixun, On Drama (Taiwan: Lianjing, 2010), 161. 3. Gao and Fang, On Drama, 117. 4. Gao Xingjian, Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2007), 81, 77. 5. Gao, “The Aesthetics of the Artist,” in Gao Xingjian, Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), 78. 6. Gao, Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, 103–104. 7. Ibid., 87. 8. Ibid., 88. 9. Ibid., 88. 10. Ibid., 106. 11. Ibid., 103. 12. Marcuse, “The Ideology of Death,” in Herbert Marcuse, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, ed. Douglas Keller (New York: Routledge, 2011), 5:123, 129. 13. Gao Xingjian, One Man’s Bible, trans. Mabel Lee (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 141–142. In fact, Lei Feng died in an accident. But many other model heroes in the Mao era did sacrifice their own lives to save others in the spirit of the “revolutionary heroism” promulgated by the state. 14. Gao, Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, 106. 15. In Soul Mountain, an individual is similarly described as “small and insignificant like a grain of sand” and “at most only a spoonful of green seawater, insignificant and fragile.” Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain, trans. Mabel Lee (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 308, 328. 16. Gao, Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, 99. 17. Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1955), 3. 18. Gao, Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, 102. 19. Marcuse, Collected Papers, 129–130. 20. Gao, Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, 104. 21. Ibid., 101. 22. Gao, One Man’s Bible, 4.

An Insignificant Individual’s Defiance 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

67

Ibid., 5. Gao, Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, 102. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 105. Gao, “The Case for Literature,” in The Case for Literature, trans. Mabel Lee (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 45. Gao, “The Case for Literature,” 46. Gao, “On Writing Literature,” 62. Gao, “The Case for Literature,” 36, 49. Gao and Fang, On Drama, 125. Ibid., 117, 125, 130. Ibid., 124. Gao, Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, 102. Gao, “The Case for Literature,” 37; Gao and Fang, On Drama, 125, 130. Gao, “On Writing Literature,” 67. Gao, “The Case for Literature,” 47. Gao Xingjian, The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2000), 186.

Chapter 5

The Art of Gao Xingjian Metamorphosis and the Grotesque in Soul Mountain Stephen Conlon In an early review of Soul Mountain published in the New York Times in 2000 shortly after the novel’s English translation was published, Richard Eder suggests: “A novel in theory, Soul Mountain is more nearly a collection of the musings, memories and poetical fantasies of a gifted, angry writer.”1 Such a misprision of the novel may be understandable as a first response from a critic who perhaps did not read the novel in Chinese and who did not have the benefit of the essays collected in Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation.2 However, when the novel is read in the light of an aesthetics that locates it as a transcultural work, even a translingual one, a different, more challenging reading is possible. When the novel is read while avoiding any attempt to box it into a specifically postmodern approach to writing, as Gao argues, the art takes on different significance:

70

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics Whether the work is appreciated depends on whether the work itself is able to enter a dialogue with the person. The two sides of the dialogue require a language of communication, and what communicates best transcends race and nation, language and culture, and history and time; the feelings and consciousness common to everyone make exchange possible and are the basis for art communication between different people.3

The communicants in this process are not those who would normally be understood in the theory of the Western novel. Here, Gao’s understanding of Chan Buddhism (Jap. Zen) needs to be taken into account. He has a way of perceiving things that may seem alien to a Western critic who tries to fit Soul Mountain into a purely postmodern or already accepted theory of what a novel should be. Such a Western view is seen by Gao as a chaos of “wanton expression”: The overflowing chaos of the self in contemporary art was uncontrollable, and salvation was sought from concepts. For the artist to control the self, there is another perspective, that you observing I to scrutinize the self, and as if it is I observing the external world, so this is not direct outpourings of the self. This kind of perspective is inherent in China’s traditional expressive painting, and modernist writers and artists from Kafka to Giacometti may be said to employ a modern formulation of this perspective. Once you detaches from the self, both the subject and the object are targeted for observation and scrutiny, and this forces the uncontrollable outpourings and expressions of the artist’s blind narcissism to yield to concentrated observation. While you and I are eyeing one another, that dark and chaotic self begins to reveal itself through a third pair of eyes belonging to he.4 The italicized pronouns disrupt the conventional grammar, evoking a double voice that suggests the reader and writer are the intended referents. But they are not only that; the pronouns are also characters in the novel:

The Art of Gao Xingjian

71

As I listen to myself and you, I let you create a she, because you are like me and also cannot bear the loneliness and have to find a partner for your conversation. … But let others debate such matters, they are of no consequence for I who am on my journey or you who are on your spiritual journey. Like me, you wander wherever you like … you and I merge and are inseparable. At this point there is a need to step back and to create space. This space is he. He is the back of you after you have turned around and left me. ... I have established for myself this way of sequencing which can be thought of as a sort of logic or karma.5 While this explanation or direction seems Eastern, with allusions to karma and the Way (or Dao), the ideas are also open to Western views: logic is offered as a synonym or alternative to karma (although in Chan, karma is perceived largely as a logical order). Things are being blended in Gao’s vision in ways that encourage the reader or the character to accept the occurrence of a double vision: The object the artist depicts is not the object but something that has been refracted through the self of the artist; the space perceived in this way is the space of the inner mind, where the three pronouns dialogue with each other as each of them sees, as in Cubism, reality from a different space in the mind.6 The significance of this double quality lies in Gao’s Chan way of seeing: initial thoughts, perceptions, or words are followed by second ones that purify our minds. This is linked to Gao’s method of composing his work when he speaks his words first and then writes them into the novel. There is much more happening in Gao’s discourses than meets the casual observer’s or critic’s eye. A first (or passing thought) reading, such as that evinced by Eder in his early review of the novel, may find the work difficult or confused. However, when the novel is read in terms of Chan Buddhism, we may see in our second thought that Gao is deliberate

72

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

and clear in what he does, as he is freeing himself from attachments to ideologies, the market, and politics, whose voices are wu nian (no thought), to create bu ran (unstained) perception. When we come to his work with our own preconceived views of what a novel or art should be, we will probably become lost in our own view and unable to dialogue with the new voices and experiences the artist offers. As in Chan, we need to look at what we read or experience at least twice. This is a form of double vision that is analogous to the hearing of a double voice that works to free us from the attachments we bring to our own passing world, especially if that world is accepted unquestioningly, as it seems to be in the West, although there may be signs that such a narrow way of seeing (laksanas or false notions or forms) all art from only a Western perspective seems to be losing sway. The vijnanas or aspects of consciousness flow together in Chan to create a sense of continuity within our life now and between our various past and future lives (or forms or works). This is our karma understood as our tradition. When we read Soul Mountain in terms of these Chan flows that we keep in mind, we see that each chapter has no clearly marked contextual beginning or ending, that time and experience flow together, that there is no actual “narrator” but a series of voices talking to themselves and each other, and no “characters” with names. The voices move toward enlightenment through the novel without judging those encountered: In this lengthy soliloquy, you are the object of what I relate, a myself that listens intently to me—you are simply my shadow. As I listen to myself and you, I let you create a she, because you are like me and also cannot bear the loneliness and have to find a partner for your conversation. … But let others discuss or debate such matters, they are of no consequence for I who am engrossed in my journey or you who are on your spiritual journey. Like me, you wander wherever you like. As the distance increases there is a converging of the two until unavoidably you and I merge and are inseparable. At this point there is a need to step back and

The Art of Gao Xingjian

73

to create space. This space is he. He is the back of you after you have turned around and left me. Neither I nor my image can see his face, it is enough to know that he is someone’s back. You who are my creation, created her and her face naturally would have to be imagined. … Moreover, her image is forever changing. For you and me, the women who constitute they are also a composite image of him. ... I don’t know whether or not you’ve noticed, but when I speak of me and you, and she, him, feminine they and masculine they, I never speak of we or us. I believe that this is much more concrete than the sham we which is totally meaningless. ... As soon as I refer to we I am immediately uncertain, how many of me are in fact implicated? Or how many of you who are the image of me, or he who is the back of you and me, or the illusion of she who was born of you and me, or the composite image they of she or he?7 Here, the grammar of the perceptions breaks by the use of pronouns in place of conventional names or characters. In this break or gap, the individual’s voices come through a purification process that transforms that individual in the aesthetic experience: The person affirmed in literature is made into another person or persons. With the help of aesthetics, the writer transforms his experiences and perceptions into different characters and, by doing this, he sublimates his inner anxieties.8 While this active aesthetics seems to be chaotic, it is the source of transformational creativity: However, the magic of literature lies in the making of another person in the creative process. This helps the writer become detached, allowing him to observe with an eye transcending

74

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics himself, a third eye, an intelligent eye, that will inform his writing. Therefore, the creative process of writing literature helps the writer purify his inner mind.9

For Gao, aesthetics is not a theory used by the reader or student to judge a work; it is the qi or energy that flows from the communication process in the creator’s mind as voices are fused together to create new forms and perceptions that are communicated to the reader following a similar process of enlightened involvement in reading the novel. In this way, the reader needs to be translingual and transcultural by absorbing these perceptions into understanding and enlightenment to become, like Gao, an ethnographer of the spirit. Gao Xingjian’s aesthetics as enunciated in his Aesthetics and Creation and embodied in Soul Mountain are rooted in his position as a Chinese writer working in the West. He creates in many different modes and in at least two languages: Chinese and French. (This does not take account of the translation of his work into other languages.) Within his works, there are other mixings of genres and voices from the tradition of Asian and Western art. To create on the border between cultures, to transcend cultures, to move between cultures: these are the characteristics of great art, and always have been. Such are the achievements of Dante and Rabelais, and Shakespeare in the West, and of Wu Cheng’en and Cao Xueqin in China. Such artists make these shifts and changes through the medium of their language. What makes such transformations possible are the building blocks of language: its heteroglossia, its diglossia, its codemixing qualities. By putting together voices, perceptions, images of our world, the great artist represents realities that, while appearing new, are composed of elements of the old placed together in new ways. These combinations of elements are the sources of art’s transformational power to change or metamorphosize itself through the aesthetic of grotesquerie. Gao Xingjian’s art transcends the borders commonly set between Eastern and Western cultures; he achieves this by combining elements

The Art of Gao Xingjian

75

of European and Chinese cultures in his novel Soul Mountain, which, in its own forms, combines other elements of his art along with other genres in a major aesthetic achievement that may point a new way for others to reconfigure the relationships that shape and define our world. By doing this, we break up the monological voice of authoritarianism, much as Rabelais did when he signaled the end of the European Middle Ages and the birth of the Renaissance. In this regard Gao seems close to the image of the artist espoused by M. M. Bakhtin. Michael Lackner and Nikola Chardonnens sense this relationship when they note that Gao’s variety of artistic forms (poetry, drama, films, paintings, as well as fiction) are a polyphony of voices. But they refrain from expanding this link because they see Bakhtin as “postmodern.”10 While disagreeing with their categorizing of Bakhtin, it is possible to expand on their insight regarding the relationship between the Russian critic and the Chinese writer, both of whom were working from experience with totalitarian regimes that fostered the monologue of authority rather than the freedom of the individual’s voices. Bakhtin did this through his study of Rabelais’s imagery that combined heterodox elements to form new grotesque forms and languages. Gao achieves such a powerful breakthrough in the novel hundreds of years later by in part returning to the old world of Chinese literature, such as in Journey to the West, where different modes of narration and characterization are blended in the grotesque figures of Monkey and Pigsy. The similarities between Rabelais and Wu Cheng’en are not signs that one artist is following another blindly. Instead, when we remember Gao’s insistence that all great art comes from the same wellsprings of telling the truth about experience, the barriers and borders that have separated Eastern and Western aesthetics for too long, especially in Western theories of art, are transcended. On the deepest of human levels, the art of China and France, the East and the West, have always been working in the same vein. For great artists, the low and high voices in a culture are fused in a dialogue of many voices, or what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia, and the

76

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

world is turned upside down in their art as we are made to see things in new double forms and visions, and to speak and listen in many voices. Gao uses this insight that is consistent with his Chan way of seeing and organizing his materials to chart the Dao of enlightenment of his multivoiced narrator as he, you, and she ascends from the environmentally polluted foot of Soul Mountain to the top, just as Dante ascends from Hell to Paradise in The Divine Comedy. With his narrator as an ethnographer, Gao describes all the different ways of life encountered on this journey and puts them together in a narrative flow that segues from one voice or reality to another in a jumble of experiences that slowly take shape as the novel moves on. His mixture of genres, characters, and languages of the various voices is an affirmation of the freedom of the artist to represent experience as it is encountered without blocking it out or homogenizing it by forcing it through a filter of preconceived notions of what a novel is or what an artist’s job should be. Without resorting to an overt ideology to excuse his blending of styles, Gao knows that the work of Beckett, Kafka, and Brecht prefigures his own methods, while at the same time being confident that his Chinese roots are yet another stream that flows into his art to make the new fusion of different things more aesthetically powerful. To see this force, we need to follow a stream in the novel closely. Chapter 19 opens with a page-long utterance or sentence that jumbles (the word is “Rabelais’s”) images that reveal themselves to be a scene of wild lovemaking that blends the animal and the human: On this chilly late-autumn night, dense heavy darkness encloses a totality of primitive chaos; indistinguishable are sky and earth, trees and rocks, and needless to say the road; you can only stay transfixed, lean forward, put out both arms to grope, to grope in this thick dark night; you hear it in motion, it is not the wind in motion but this darkness which is devoid of top bottom left right distance and sequence; you are wholly fused in this chaos, conscious only that you once possessed the outline of a body, but

The Art of Gao Xingjian

77

that this outline in your consciousness is rapidly vanishing … you feel it is a dream; there is no need to be anxious but you can’t help being anxious because it is too strangely tranquil.11 While “you” may be understood as the narrator’s other voice, it is also the reader who feels these emotions as he or she is struck by the underpunctuated mixture of images that is Gao’s prose at this point. Slowly, we realize that the narrator has been making love and that such actions are seemingly animalistic: She struggles, calls you an animal! She has been stalked, hunted, torn apart, devoured. Ah … this dense palpable darkness, primordial chaos, no sky no ground, no space, no time, no existence and no non-existence; non-existence exists so there is non-existence of existence … human and animal invoking primitive darkness; forest tiger in agony … the animal bites, roars, and possessed by spirits, jumps and leaps.12 The wild man, the shaman, the physical and spiritual, the chaos of a ritualistic act, all are fused into a grotesquerie of poetic images that demands that readers lose themselves in the turbulence of the language and feel the experience being represented. Life is being magically transformed in the chaos of language that is in the consciousness of the characters. We are in their streams of inner and outer experiences as we feel the blending of their relationship in the chaos of words. By undergoing this experience, we understand them by being mimetically involved in their lives at this point as they shamanistically metamorphose into various shapes. The chapter ends with three apparently disconnected utterances, sentences, paragraphs in a story the girl asks you to tell: You love me, The girl was seduced by the snake, The snake is my big brother.13 The ancient roots of what is happening here may be traced to Lu Ji’s The Art of Writing:

78

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics The interactions of sounds and tones are like The five colors that enhance each other: Although they dwell and vanish by no common rule, And their tortuous, intricate ways permit no liberty, Yet if a poet masters the secret of change and order, He will channel them like directing streams to obtain a Fountain.14

It may also be related to Western art through the aesthetics of the grotesque, as described by Bakhtin: These forms seemed to be interwoven as if giving birth to each other. The borderlines that divide the kingdoms of nature in the usual picture of the world were boldly infringed. There was no longer the movement of finished forms, vegetable or animal, in a finished and stable world; instead, the inner movement of being itself was expressed in the passing of one form into the other, in the ever incomplete character of being.15 The similarities between the various aesthetics suggests that there is a deep folk element to all art that is transcultural and cuts across languages, times, and spaces. Gao Xingjian’s framing of his novel as the records of an ethnographer who searches for the folk roots of China after he is given a reprieve from what seemed to be a death sentence misdiagnosis of cancer is not carelessly jumbling things together as “the musings, memories and poetical fantasies”16 suggested by Eder. Instead, we should understand his literary art as a major achievement that places cultures, languages, and art forms together in ways that are deeply imbedded in both Western and Eastern art. His work may be the first major blending of the cultures that points to new ways for the artist that are also ways back to the sources and traditions seemingly forgotten, until someone such as Gao unearths them and changes them into something so new and surprising that our initial bewildered responses blind and deafen us to what is before our eyes and in our ears. The languages of art need more ethnographers like

The Art of Gao Xingjian

79

him who are willing to take risks with their art if we are to bridge the (often illusory or false) divides that have kept apart things that should be together. The language of the grotesque seems appropriate in any effort to put together arts and cultures from different times and spaces to heal the spiritual wounds that recent history has often foisted on us as the only way to understand that East and West can never meet. His work is itself a combination of what may appear to an ear with only Western aesthetics as it has been practiced recently in mind as strange and “grotesque” in the negative sense of the term. The deep cultural affinities, the elective ones, that all great art shares are a language that allows its artists and their readers to communicate with each other in the terms of art—high and low (diglossic), Chinese, French, and English (heteroglossic)—and to see the future coming out of the past as a way forward in our struggles to give voice to the truths of human nature that have never changed in their fundamentals, yet are also in a constant state of flux that is at the heart of aesthetic metamorphosis. Such art will challenge and disturb us at first as it confronts our comfortable sense of reality. But, as Gao states emphatically: Literature confronts human beings, individual concrete living human beings. ...17 Literary works are more truthful than histories written by authorities. … Humankind is thus provided with a history of the soul that is more truthful.18

80

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Notes 1. Richard Eder, “Books of the Times: A Dreamlike Chinese Journey Haunted by Past and Present,” New York Times, December 18, 2000, http:// www.nytimes.com/2000/12/18/books/books-of-the-times-a-dreamlikechinese-journey-haunted-by-past-and-present.html?scp=3&sq=soul+ mountain&st=cse&pagewanted=print. 2. Gao Xingjian, Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012). 3. Gao, “Another Kind of Aesthetics,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, 110. 4. Ibid., 121. 5. Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain, trans. Mabel Lee (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2001; first published in Chinese in 1990), 312–314. 6. Gao, “Another Kind of Aesthetics,” 122. 7. Gao, Soul Mountain, 312–313. 8. Gao, “Environment and Literature,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, 199. 9. Ibid., 200. 10. Michael Lackner and Nikola Chardonnens, eds, Polyphony Embodied: Freedom and Fate in Gao Xingjian’s Writings (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2014), 3. 11. Gao, Soul Mountain, 113–114. 12. Ibid., 114–115. 13. Ibid., 116. 14. Translated by Shih-Hsiang Chen and Sam Hamill,http://web.mnstate.edu/ gracyk/courses/web%20publishing/LuChi.htm, retrieved July 26, 2016. 15. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984; first published in Russian in 1965), 32. 16. Eder, “Books of the Times.” 17. Gao, “Environment and Literature,” 196. 18. Ibid., 203.

Chapter 6

Women and the Dao in Gao Xingjian’s Works Liu Jianmei

Among the existing scholarly works on Gao Xingjian’s approach to gender relations and the female problem, some studies are inclined to label Gao a misogynist writer. In his review of Soul Mountain, Kam Louie asserts that Gao’s “misogynist fantasies are resonant with traditional prejudices that saw young women as only one step from being swept away by the flood of sexual desire.”1 Less critically, some scholars respond that Gao’s representation of women is problematic because he focuses on his own social and cultural identity and merely uses women as the projection of his own anxiety and desire rather than truly sympathizing with women’s problems and fate.2 However, in the eyes of other scholars and critics, Gao Xingjian’s treatment of women’s images in his plays and fiction shed the didacticism of his aesthetic and philosophical models, allowing him to delve into female thinking and female subconscious.

82

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Mabel Lee, for example, challenges the notion of Gao Xingjian’s perceived misogyny and provides alternative perspectives on his multilayered theatrical depictions of the female psyche. By discussing some of Gao’s representative plays, she has affirmed his sympathetic attitude toward women and his interest in exploring women’s emotions, psyche, and inner world.3 Also seeing the label “misogynist” as ignoring the complexity and dynamics of Gao’s depiction of gender problems, Mary Mazzilli argues that “Between Life and Death is one of the best examples of his complex approach to gender issues, as it features a woman and focuses on the female condition.”4 Drawing on the existing scholarly studies that have gone beyond the misogynist paradigm, I intend to explore the connection between the Chan (Zen) Buddhist comprehension of Dao and the representation of women in Gao Xingjian’s novels and plays.5 As desire and sexual relationships play a crucial part in Chan, the role of women is inevitably bound up with self-awareness and selfreflection, which are enshrined by Gao Xingjian as necessary on the path toward individual enlightenment. In his view, even if women’s roles are socially and culturally constructed or sometimes become a privileged trope for defying social convention, the truth that emerges from secular life often incorporates spirituality into women’s unique biological and psychological construction, immune to men’s full understanding but inexorably furnishing a way to the state of Chan.

The Rou Power of Femininity It would be impossible to propose a single decoding or equivalence of meaning for Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, which implies that a numinous and immanent spiritual home exists inside one’s heart rather than outside as a visible entity. The fundamental questions “What is the self?” and “What is Soul Mountain?” remain unanswered, open to various kinds of deciphering and comprehension, passing from one heart to another, as manifested by Huineng in Gao’s opera Snow in August. Similarly, the allegorical anecdotes in Gao’s novels and plays provide a vicarious outlet

Women and the Dao in Gao Xingjian’s Works

83

for a Chan Buddhist comprehension of women’s problems, which may carry multilayered meanings. One allegorical anecdote, originally from a biji of the Jin dynasty and featuring a Buddhist nun disemboweling herself and cleansing her intestines, appears not only in chapter 48 of Soul Mountain but also as a sideshow with a stage performance in the play Between Life and Death. With a touch of surrealism, this fable unfolds on several levels, as a political warning, a morality tale, and a religious or philosophical allegory, as Gao points out in Soul Mountain.6 Since the main character in this tale is a Buddhist nun, the tale allows for spontaneity of gender expression and incorporates a sense of the female self’s relations to men as well as to the world. By highlighting Gao’s interest in the “ungendered/original self,” Terry Siu-han Yip and Kwok-kan Tam argue that Gao has gone beyond the context of gender/sexual opposition; therefore the nun’s insistence on cleansing her filthy intestines relays a philosophical dimension, “symbolic of her conscious attempt to detach herself from moral ties in the world.”7 Such a reading, which aligns with Gao’s embrace of Chan Buddhist transcendence of binary antagonisms, contributes an interesting and convincing interpretation of the story. However, I propose to present here a reading from the philosophical dimension of gender and subjectivity, which demands not to be ignored. In chapter 48 of Soul Mountain, the narrator “you” is attracted to the story not because he is a historian, has political aspirations, is an expert in Buddhism and wants to preach religion, or wants to become a paragon of virtue. He is only fascinated with “the superb purity of the story” and has the desire to tell “her,” who may be the embodiment of every woman, either projected by the narrator’s desire and anxiety or simply an incarnation of women in general. Why is this story especially told on behalf of a woman? A second question concerns Gao’s gender stance: What kind of Dao is embedded in such a gendered tale? Like Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus” that features a man condemned to ceaselessly push a rock up a mountain and see it roll back down the

84

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

valley, Gao’s narrative tries to find the value of life through the Buddhist nun’s repetitive self-cleansing with its inherent meaninglessness. The Grand Marshall in the story is ambitious and plans to usurp the ruler of the state, but after watching the nun’s ritualistic cleansing of her intestines, he eventually gives up the idea and remains a loyal minister. The Buddhist nun seems to offer the Grand Marshall not only a pragmatic lesson in life but also a philosophical inspiration that enables him to reflect on his own desire and ambition, which are analogous to filthy intestines. Through the abnegation of endless worldly desires and ambitions, he quits the bloody struggle for power. The fact that the powerful official defers to the Buddhist nun’s hint at apocalyptic truth is in line with Laozi’s recondite saying: “Acknowledge the male, but retain the female: be a drain-way for the world below the sky; As a drain-way for the world below the sky, your constant power will never depart, will lead back home to infancy” (stanza 28).8 In Laozi’s philosophy, the female is associated with rou, referring to water, which contains an important message pertaining to the Dao. “In this world below the sky, the gentle will outdo the strong” (stanza 43); “What more gentle in this world than water? Yet nothing better conquers hard and strong” (stanza 78). By privileging rou, water, as well as femininity over gang, masculinity, Laozi delivers the Way (or Dao) on both social and cosmic levels, in which the power of the gentle overwhelms that of the strong and eventually leads to wuwei against any conscious government. Through reiterating this tale, Gao Xingjian ostensibly not only takes a stance in favor of the power of femininity but also resorts to the Way as defined by Laozi, asserting the unity underlying the oppositions and divisions and thus going back to the simplicity and harmony symbolized by the state of infancy, for this is where the true self or the original self can be said to abide. Gao has achieved powerful effects in rethinking gender relations by evoking Laozi’s notion of privileging femininity. His play Song of the Night is a unique and outstanding work imbued with a lyrical and poetic tone probing women’s complicated inner world; more importantly, it offers

Women and the Dao in Gao Xingjian’s Works

85

a philosophical approach to women’s problems as well as gender issues. Like Between Life and Death, the play can be viewed as an unconscious as well as a metaphysical trip of the character “she,” who is played by one female actor simultaneously addressing the audience and performing the role. This female actor and two background female dancers—one melancholy and the other vivacious—together compose the floating and multiple subjectivities of “she.” In addition, the pronouns “you,” “I,” and “she” all refer to the female protagonist, presenting her self-searching and her Chan Buddhist meditation on gender roles and human existence. It is a very ambitious play that focuses purely on a woman’s discourse: her body, her right to sexual fulfillment, her will to take control of her fate, her proclivity to live in the present and returning to life itself, and her biological differences from men all lead to completely different ways of feeling and thinking. Instead of involving himself in a women’s holy war against men, a battle forever confined by an arbitrary dichotomy of “either/or,” Gao endeavors to call for a genuine understanding of the female psyche and female thinking, a perspective that would help retrieve what has been committed to oblivion in the grand history created by men. Just as Zhuangzi in his “On the Equality of Things” advocates that the all-encompassing Dao contains and understands opposites, Gao Xingjian questions any fixed opinion and position in the male–female sexual relationship. His representation of women in the play not only pays attention to women’s subconscious and thoughts but also grasps the essence of female subjectivity that goes beyond the given social roles as mother, wife, mistress, and daughter. A utopian world of females in his eyes is far more peaceful and harmonious than that of men: In a country established by women Flowers in the heart blossom fully Making gentleness transcend violence Making seduction replace invasion And the world much more beautiful9

86

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

After all, “she” is the symbol of life itself, creating rather than destroying, living in the present rather than fabricating utopias to fool everyone. Gao Xingjian discovers that women’s biological difference from men does not make the female an inferior gender, but on the contrary, can construct a more balanced world. The power of femininity, eulogized by Gao Xingjian in this play, seems to be more potent than the power of masculinity that favors fame, strength, and endless wars.

Social and Philosophical Dimensions of Gender Subjectivity In Between Life and Death, the Buddhist nun once again is disemboweling herself with scissors and washing her entrails as a “sideshow” of “woman”/ actress/narrator involved in the painful discovery of the gendered self. The performance of self-disemboweling and self-cleansing is unambiguously in tune with the inner monologue of “woman,” in which the discovery of self is accompanied by reflection on the self, with “an unending effort to break free from the enclosure, from the prison of obsessive thoughts, fears and delusions.”10 Gao has made a remarkable literary contribution to the exploration of the female psyche and inner world in which he emphasizes the negative side of the relationship between men and women. As Henry Zhao points out, The difficulty in determining the Dramatic She highlights Gao’s central theme that communication by ordinary means—whether language or love-making—is bound to reach an impasse. He seems to be pessimistic about a constructive relationship between the Dramatic I and the Dramatic She, and this pessimism is in fact inherent in Buddhism. If one cannot understand sexual seduction, one can hardly be free from other worldly temptations.11 Such a pessimistic view of the male–female relationship is intended as a reminder that one can never rely on another, be it a passionate lover

Women and the Dao in Gao Xingjian’s Works

87

or an indifferent sexual partner, to rescue one from the entrapment of secular life. First, all the pain and anguish derived from the entangled relationship between men and women is inevitably socially and culturally constructed. By questioning the Yip and Tam emphasis on an “asexual/ungendering” primordial human nature that may “ultimately lead to an essentialization of sexual differences” or “a reinforcement of gender stereotypes against which feminism tries to fight through efforts of ‘gendering,’” Gary Xu veers toward interpreting the Buddhist nun’s tale of belly cutting and intestine cleansing as a symbol of gender politics.12 Indeed, in the context of patriarchal injustice, Woman’s monologue as well as the Buddhist nun’s self-cleansing can be read as a “her” story, displaying what has been erased or suppressed by the dominant history of male supremacy. In chapter 58 of Soul Mountain, Gao writes: “When Nüwa created humans she also created their sufferings. Humans are created from the entrails of Nüwa and born in the bloody fluids of women and so they can never be washed clean.”13 Representing the primitive subconsciousness of human beings in Chinese tradition, Nüwa’s entrails, which bred both men and women, reveal the cultural and historical construction of women as impure and contaminated. The Buddhist nun’s action of cleansing her intestines adumbrates a dogged persistence to wash away sociocultural accusations of impurity and expel innate suffering, even if it is usually in vain. Sympathetic with women, Gao’s rejection of the hierarchical construction of the relationship between men and women in Chinese patriarchal society is palpable in his play City of the Dead. Second, in addition to such a reading that questions established and existing notions of gender difference in patriarchal discourse, we can read this tale in the light of existentialism as well as Chan Buddhism. Instead of indulging in a women’s war against men, or vice versa— a battle perpetually within “the vicious circle of endless revolutions inherent in the negation of negation,”14 Gao has gone one step further to prove that all the sufferings and bemusement are the manifestation

88

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

of the self-made prison of gendered subjectivity. As he notes in chapter 72 of Soul Mountain, “no-one is the winner in battles between men and women.”15 What most egregiously hinders one from releasing the self is not his/her sexual partner but the prison within his/her own heart. Even after Woman kills Man in the play Between Life and Death, or Man and Girl annihilate each other in the play Dialogue and Rebuttal, Woman and Girl are still not emancipated from their unbearable loneliness and agony. Such impossibility of communication between men and women produces the same dark situation in which Man is imprisoned as well. The reciprocal torture between men and women that is driven by desire is apparently a self-made hell, both internally and externally. After all, as Gao writes in Soul Mountain: “Humans are simply such creatures, fettered by perplexities and inflicting anxiety upon themselves.”16 Therefore, the Buddhist nun’s compulsive action of self-cleansing, which is intended to symbolically convey self-dissecting, self-reflecting, and self-awakening, is an expression of the philosophical purpose that informs the writing and is redirected from somatic to spiritual concerns. “What directs a person’s fate is not solely determined by his life’s environment, it is determined by his understanding of the self”17—Gao is interested not so much in the social construction of such physical cleansing as in its philosophical significance. Therefore, the self-cleansing is performed above all for its value of freeing the self from all the torment and suffering generated by self-obsession. It is an indispensable step to unlocking the chain, namely desire, created by the gendered self. As Gao wrote: “To flounder helplessly is like suffering and the whole of humanity is made up of individual selves. When you fall in, you must crawl out yourself because saviors aren’t concerned with such trifling matters.”18 Human beings, men or women, must rely on self-salvation from suffering and bafflement, including desire, sexual entanglement, and other predicaments, and thus obtain spiritual freedom. The endless self-disemboweling and selfcleansing not only contain a sense of the absurdity of existential concerns for freedom but also give insight into the Chan Buddhist comprehension

Women and the Dao in Gao Xingjian’s Works

89

of the Dao and women, which goes beyond any politics and “isms,” including those of sex and gender.

Women and Freedom Gao Xingjian’s portrayal of women is undeniably associated with the question of freedom, through which to convey observations about the existential condition of human beings and the relationship of that condition to the spiritual home. In “Freedom and Literature,” Gao clearly encapsulates a double sense of an individual’s alienation and complicity: “The individual living in a specific society is continually subjected to a variety of regulations—from politics, ethics, customs and religion, to family, marriage and sexual relationships—that impose numerous restrictions on the individual’s action.”19 In addition to modern totalitarian regimes and market consumerism that suppress the self, he invokes sexual relationships—the complexity of human nature—as important individual dilemmas to be dealt with, especially given his serious concern with the notion of freedom. How can a woman truly obtain freedom? Such an inquiry is exemplified in One Man’s Bible. Is a woman living in diaspora merely the projection of Gao’s subjectivity? Does she have her own subjectivity? Is it a paradoxical freedom when a woman resigns herself to being infatuated with sexual desire and drowning in a sea of unrestricted lust? As Henry Y.H. Zhao points out, Soul Mountain supplies us “probably with the richest depictions of the female sex.”20 In Marián Gálik’s detailed analysis, he discovers that Gao Xingjian’s profound delineation of a series of images of women is not limited to the ubiquitous traditional stereotype that divides women into “angelic” and “adulterous.” For example, in chapter 39 of Soul Mountain, Miao girls are not influenced and fettered by the stringent moral regulations of Han culture and appear to be more primitive, freely pursuing sexual freedom.21 Indeed, Gao’s complicated and multilayered depiction of the female psyche, self, and inner world, based on “a lively communication with women and men of the Han

90

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

nation and other nationalities, of different social strata and ideological, philosophical and religious orientations,”22 has brought to light the true existential condition of women that cannot be simply reduced to a moral judgment. Two foreign women in One Man’s Bible audaciously stress freedom, individuality, and independent thinking: the Jewish woman Margarethe and the French woman Sylvie. In sharp contrast to the Chinese women depicted in the novel, who are fettered by the ties of country, family, and household as well as moral and ethical codes, these two foreign women own much more space for sexual freedom. These provocative female characters, whose erotic pursuits are amplified as signifiers respectively for dependent freedom and independent freedom, stage a feminine spectacle that suggests greater aptitude for self-salvation than for subordination to the gaze of male subjectivity. Margarethe is a young Jewish woman the narrator had met several years earlier and then reencounters in Hong Kong. In Carlos Rojas’s analysis, “Throughout much of the first half of the novel, for instance, Margarethe functions as the narrator’s alter-ego, mirroring his own diasporic condition, eliciting the narratives of his past, while at the same time providing an ironic counterpoint to his own obsession with personal origins.”23 However, even if to a certain extent Margarethe’s diasporic position truly reflects that of the narrator, it doesn’t mean she lacks female subjectivity and functions merely as his sexual object or the embodiment of some aspects or dimensions of his own subjectivity. The narrator’s memory of the Cultural Revolution is elicited by Margarethe, who in the novel symbolizes Western suffering that parallels the historical burden of bitterness of China under Mao. The dialogical and sexual relationship between the narrator and Margarethe is equal rather than one being dominant and the other submissive. Living in diaspora, they both enjoy the freedom of birds in flight: unconfined by national boundaries, family responsibilities, and conventional morality. However, whereas the narrator is focused on forgetting

Women and the Dao in Gao Xingjian’s Works

91

his painful history and memories and enjoying the present moment, Margarethe beleaguers him with pleas for stories of his tormented past in China. She herself is burdened with the sufferings of the Jews and the racial humiliation of the Turks.24 The Jewish identity that Margarethe cannot escape constitutes the limit of her freedom, but paradoxically it is also the condition of her diasporic and sexual freedom. Like what Zhuangzi describes as youdai—a form of freedom with certain conditions, as shown in Liezi’s flying depending on wind—Margarethe’s individual identity in conjunction with Jewish suffering recognizes the a priori racial nature of human existence. In contrast, the narrator refuses to accord his national identity and historical memory priority over his enjoyment of freedom in diaspora: “the China that you thought you had left continues to perplex you, you must make a clean break with it.”25 He constantly and persistently emphasizes the importance of living in the present—a way to avoid the overriding preoccupation with painful national memory. Unlike Margarethe, the other Western woman, Sylvie, is emblematic of a kind of freedom that depends on nothing. Randomly involved in many sexual relationships and having boyfriends all over the world, such as an Arab from North Africa, an Irishman, a quarter-Jewish Hungarian, a Jew from Israel, and the narrator from China, she is obviously unaffected by politics, racial history, memory, financial concerns, and moral and ethical regulations, and personifies the freedom of wudai described by Zhuangzi as depending on nothing. Yet even such a flamboyant and open-minded woman who wholeheartedly enjoys sexual freedom has anxieties, and wants a stable home and the right sort of man. “Her anxiety was deepseated, but it was an anxiety caused by a conflict between freedom and restriction that everyone had. In other words, what were the limits of freedom?”26 In contrast to the Chinese girls who had to survive under the totalitarian regime and struggle for basic rights as individuals, Sylvie is lucky to possess so much freedom yet still cannot escape perplexity and anxiety. The question Gao has posed about freedom and restriction is a profound existential issue in the Western world and one many philosophers have discussed. Following Kant’s theory that true freedom is

92

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

equated with rational self-determination in the sphere of morality, Hegel claims that individuals achieve full freedom through commitment to the duties and virtues of sittlichkeit (ethical life).27 Steeped in the paradox of freedom and restriction, the image of Sylvie does reflect Gao Xingjian’s philosophical comprehension of the dilemma of the human condition and human life. While Sylvie seems able to do whatever she wants, being free from social, moral, and ethical commitments, inexorably she falls into the trap of nihilism and is captive to unhappiness. “What she was searching for was the ultimate in both love and sexual excitement. But that was an ideal, what people dreamed about, utopia. She was aware of this, but it made her sad, profoundly sad, it was the profound sadness of being human, an eternal sadness that could never be dispelled.”28 Sylvia’s sorrowfulness indicates that a utopia established on sexual gratification is doomed to crumble and collapse. At the end of the novel, Gao concludes that the utopian sexual relationship does not exist. And he is unconvinced that an absolute freedom would suit the labyrinthine involutions of the empirical world. However, if one lives within practical reality, socalled freedom without restriction, depending on nothing—wudai—is not impossible to fully actualize. If the sexual relationship between men and women looms large in Gao Xingjian’s Chan meditation, the melancholy embedded in One Man’s Bible speaks unmistakably to the unfeasibility of freedom derived from attachments to love, sex, marriage, and family. However, as pessimistic as this may sound, Gao Xingjian does point to a way out for both men and women: absolute freedom can only be realized in the aesthetic and spiritual realm, resembling what Zhuangzi advocates. In Gao’s own words, “it is only in the realm of the purely spiritual that humankind can possess an abundance of freedom.”29 In general, the Dao intrinsic in Gao’s portrayal of women points to the awakening of the self in concrete and authentic existential dilemmas. “Free will is determined by the awakening of the self”30—which means one should not depend upon a love relationship or a sexual relationship to obtain freedom. The series of images of women in Gao’s plays and novels is particularly pertinent to the enlightenment of the self, whose fate is

Women and the Dao in Gao Xingjian’s Works

93

determined by self-understanding rather than by life environment. At the same time, those male–female relationships indicate a deeper correlation between freedom and aesthetics permeated with the awareness of the self, whose attainment of spiritual freedom is found not in the outer world but in the mind of the individual.

94

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Notes 1. Kam Louie, “Review: In Search of the Chinese Soul in the Mountains of the South,” The China Journal 45 (2001): 145–149. 2. Carlos Rojas, “Without [Femin]ism: Femininity as Axis of Alterity and Desire in Gao Xingjian’s One Man’s Bible,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14, no. 2 (2002): 163–206. 3. Mabel Lee, “Gao Xingjian: Autobiography and the Portrayal of the Female Psyche,” in Gao, City of the Dead and Song of the Night, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong and Mabel Lee (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2016), vii–xxvii. 4. Mary Mazzilli, “Gender in Gao Xingjian’s Between Life and Death: The Notion of Originary Self and the Use of Tripartition,” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, no. 3 (2015): 369–394. 5. This article is based on my previous short essay “Gao Xingjian’s Theatrical Portrayals of the Female Psyche,” a book review of City of the Dead and Song of the Night by Gao Xingjian, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong and Mabel Lee. See MCLC Resource Center, January 2015, http://u.osu.edu/mclc/ book-reviews/liujianmei/. 6. Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain, trans. Mabel Lee (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2000), 284–285. 7. Terry Siu-han Yip and Kwok-kan Tam, “Gender and Self in Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays,” in Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian, ed. Kwok-kan Tam (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2002), 215–233. 8. This and the following two quotes are from Laozi, Dao de jing: The Book of the Way, trans. Moss Roberts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 88, 118, 183. 9. Gao Xingjian, Song of the Night, trans. Mabel Lee, in Gao, City of the Dead and Song of the Night, 78. 10. Izabella Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre: From the Word to the Image (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 162. 11. Henry Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre: Gao Xingjian and Chinese Theatre Experimentalism (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 2000), 188.

Women and the Dao in Gao Xingjian’s Works

95

12. Gang Gary Xu, “My Writing, Your Pain, and Her Trauma: Pronouns and (Gendered) Subjectivity in Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14, no. 2 (2002): 103. 13. Gao, Soul Mountain, 350. 14. Gao Xingjian, “Freedom and Literature,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), 233. 15. Gao, Soul Mountain, 455. 16. Ibid., 350. 17. Gao, “Freedom and Literature,” 232. 18. Gao, Soul Mountain, 51. 19. Gao, “Freedom and Literature,” 228. 20. Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, 59. 21. Marián Gálik, “Gao Xingjian’s Novel Lingshan (Soul Mountain): A Long Journey in Search of a Woman?” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (December 2003): 619. 22. Gálik, “Gao Xingjian’s Novel Lingshan,” 626. 23. Rojas, “Without [Femin]ism,” 191. 24. Gao Xingjian, One Man’s Bible, trans. Mabel Lee (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 67. 25. Gao, One Man’s Bible, 48. 26. Ibid., 388. 27. George Klosko, History of Political Theory: An Introduction: Volume II: Modern, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 30–32. 28. Gao, One Man’s Bible, 388. 29. Gao, “Freedom and Literature,” 231. 30. Ibid.

Part II

Trans-Discipline, Trans-Genre, Trans-Media and Trans-Culture

Chapter 7

Nonattachment and Gao Xingjian’s Neutral Actor Gilbert Fong and Shelby Chan

Drama, according to Gao Xingjian, is performance, and the actions on the stage are nothing more than make-believe. This pretension, or theatricality, needs to be made clear to the audience. To facilitate the communication process and to enhance its efficacy, actors, Gao maintains, must equip themselves with awareness of their craft, being conscious not only of the character they are playing but also of the fact that they are putting on a performance as a performer. Gao’s idea of the tripartition of the actor is familiar to most critics and scholars. Here we seek to elucidate two main points: neutrality as consciousness and as part of his penchant for the Buddhist concept of

100

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

nonattachment. The latter is the key to understanding his idea of theater as well as the relationship between his life and his art.

Preparation In Gao’s opinion, there exists in any performance a tripartition of the actor on the stage: the self, the neutral actor, and the character. The self is the “me” of everyday life, with accumulated habits, mannerisms, and ways of talking, etc. And this, together with the surrounding physical and emotional background, constructs a web structure that defines the self. How can this web be prevented from hindering the actor’s movement and physical presence when performing the character onstage? Before such a safeguard can be instituted, the actor must enter a preparatory state of neutrality to put aside the “me” of everyday life, and focus attention and energy on a process of purgation. Most actors in commercial theater today subscribe to Stanislavskian realism and Method Acting. In preparing for performance, typically their goal is to get ready to become the character. Gao’s aim, however, is for actors to move away from their everyday self and mind-set (figure 1). The similarity, perhaps, lies in the attempt by both Gao and realistic acting to have actors discard their usual characteristics. Here Gao deliberately separates the preparation phase from the character and performance to make room for the neutral actor, who represents a buffer zone keeping the potential performance in suspense and ready for actualization. Neutrality is not a new concept in modern theater. It was the pivotal idea in the theory of the Neutral Mask first advocated by Jacques Copeau’s Vieux Colombier School in Paris in the 1920s.1 The Neutral Mask was not a method of acting but a means to train actors. The mask enabled students “to locate the body in a non-daily dimension but in a ‘universal’ one, in a sort of neutral state of permanent discovery of life.”2

Nonattachment and Gao Xingjian’s Neutral Actor

101

Figure 1. Preparation of the neutral actor.

Jacques Lecoq, who carried on Copeau’s teaching, explained that the state of mind when an actor puts on a neutral mask tends toward the finality of emptiness, or a “fulcrum point which doesn’t exist.”3 The actor cannot be completely neutral and can only approach neutrality and neutral action, and expend only the energy required at the moment.4 At this point, the actor is like a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper ready to be written on. It is a condition where actors deny their own attitudes and mannerisms.5 Gao Xingjian is interested in masks, which he considers magical and believes should be reintroduced into contemporary theater. He also thinks that the key to acting in masks lies in the relationship between the mask and the actor behind it; because attention is focused on the distance the mask can create between actor and audience, such distance enables the actor to produce enough space to control enactment of the role. Once behind a mask, the actor can be at ease, have time to focus, liberate movements, and break away from usual behavior and mannerisms. The actor can also calmly observe the reactions of the audience and draw their attention with appropriate action. The painted face in Asian theater can have the same effect.6 Lecoq believes that the actor should not strive to expend any energy that would render him into a personality and distinguish him from others

102

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

by what he adds. He should be in a state of not knowing what to do next, responding to the situation in a purely sensory way. The Neutral Mask is almost automatic, intuitive in its passivity: “Neutral … does not mean absent. It means without a past, open, ready. One cannot act psychologically because the eye doesn’t travel. The eye is replaced by the head.”7 Gao’s neutrality, however, is a conscious state, voluntary and capable of agency. In eradicating the usual self, the actor knows what must be done and fully comprehends the purpose of the actions to take place. The neutrality Gao describes runs parallel to the character and the actor’s self, so that the actor can move from one state to another. Lecoq’s Neutral Mask has no memory; it is a state of unloaded preparedness before the action. Gao also talks about preparedness prior to action, i.e., performance, but his neutrality is a position where the actor can be waiting or acting, rather than merely quiescent. It is the presence of absence. Lecoq’s Neutral Mask is an understanding of the nature of performance, not a guide to performance, while Gao attempts to accomplish both in his constant exploration of the new possibilities of the theater.

Performance Both Gao and Lecoq advocate purging the everyday self, but Gao avoids the passivity of Lecoq by assigning neutrality to the transformation of self-consciousness into a “Third Eye,” a perceptive eye of wisdom that the actor can use as the means to observe the stage, the audience, and the actor’s own performance.8 The Third Eye requires a high degree of concentration. It places itself above and beyond the character, and because of this, it can provide a clarity of vision without interference from or being blinded by emotion, while control over the character and communication with other characters can become more accurate and perceptive.

Nonattachment and Gao Xingjian’s Neutral Actor

103

One of the key elements in this observation is the ability to listen, i.e., to hear yourself speak. “These two things are closely tied together. When you are observing, you are at the same time listening.” The prerequisite is to purge the self, so that one is totally relaxed or in a state of forgetting oneself—only then can one be watchful of the world and other people.9 According to Gao, if the listening process is initiated by the actor speaking, the actor will not be able to hear him- or herself; however, if the actor regards the speaker as “you,” then the actor’s own speech will be clearly heard. A distance will be generated, enabling the actor to exit both his or her own self and the character’s self. In this manner, the actor must observe and listen to acquire appropriate control over the acting process.10 By exercising surveillance and alertness, the actor removes superfluous and disorderly emotions to actualize correctly and powerfully the character’s qualities on the stage. There is an obvious reason for Gao to adopt the label of the neutral “actor”—he clearly intends to indicate that even though the actor is in a state of neutrality, the actor is still “acting.” In his latest exegesis on the neutral actor and how this can be accomplished, Gao re-emphasizes the agency of neutrality and likens the process to puppetry: the actor’s consciousness is the puppeteer, the neutral actor is the pair of hands controlled by the consciousness, and the puppet is the character being played. Clearly the neutral actor has a task, to control how the character performs, just as the hands of puppeteers manipulate puppets.11 Gao further explains that the puppeteer cannot totally immerse himself in the puppet’s emotions. “Just imagine, if they were to become one and both laugh and cry at the same time, the puppet show would become impossible.” The puppeteer, like the neutral actor, must be observant and in control.12 By regarding the body as a puppet, the actor attains the appropriate mental state for performing. Physical movements will immediately become nonintuitive because the actor’s own body is the focus. In other words, the actor will “rediscover” the otherized body of the self, and the movements will not be conditioned only by emotions13

104

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

but will be enacted according to what the actor’s Third Eye observes and what the actor’s consciousness thereby requires (figure 2). Figure 2. Performance of the neutral actor.

To Gao Xingjian, neutrality is not total self-effacement, which is an impossibility, nor is it a piece of blank paper or total emptiness. The term he uses is “purification,” “cleansing,” or “purging,” to get rid of the old, existing, and customary, to make way for something new, additional, or even unusual, likely something not indigenous to oneself. Neutrality also transforms self-consciousness into a Third Eye, an “eye of wisdom” that observes intently, to scrutinize and judge how the actor is performing the role.14 The mind is sufficiently relaxed when the actor arrives at a state of forgetting the self. Neutrality thus serves as a medium enabling the actor to control and adjust performance, helping entry into and exit from the

Nonattachment and Gao Xingjian’s Neutral Actor

105

character.15 This demands the abandonment of habitual identification, a self-awareness on the part of the actor’s own make-believe. However, observation alone could become overly rational, for the actor still must experience the character. Observation can only be allowed to happen occasionally and last for moments. It is because of the shift between observing and experiencing that the actor can enter into and exit from the character and regulate excesses in acting.16 For this reason, the neutral actor is absent but also present, emphasizing the here and now and being ready to change and switch while moving from one state to another. Equipped with distance from the character portrayed, the actor can observe and assess the performing self, other actors on the stage, and, more importantly, the audience. There is no doubt that a relationship between actor and character exists in any performance. According to Gao, a talented and experienced actor is already a neutral actor and possesses a certain air or aura that lights up the stage on appearance.17 Such an actor will take full advantage of that neutrality to be dynamic, intelligent, witty, or humorous. Without total immersion in the character, this actor can communicate with the audience at will and act out and even criticize the character.

Nonattached Acting Gao is wary of the “unbridled narcissism” of modern art: it must be consciously controlled to ensure that a work does not become affected posturing. The Third Eye creates a distance between the artist and the work and cools down the heat of narcissism so that the artist can develop a more objective attitude toward the artwork.18 In theater, artistic narcissism has been translated into uncontrolled excesses such as emotional explosions and the actor’s immersion into a role. As Gao puts it, the actor must learn to let go of the self, because only then can the body be liberated and the soul be at ease on the stage. This is the only way an actor can achieve self-transcendence and avoid emotional outbursts. Even

106

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

if such emotions are required, they should not just gush out from the actor but should instead derive from the mood resulting from observing the character being enacted. Once this self-awareness is achieved, the actor will acquire the greatest of freedom and enjoyment in acting.19 In modern theater, the controversy of the actor–character identification started with Denis Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting (1883).20 Good actors, Diderot argued, detach themselves from the characters they play. They should be “cold and tranquil spectators to their actions on stage.”21 The “paradox” lies in the fact that acting should be the unemotional expression of emotions, i.e., aesthetic distance allows actors the control necessary to create the illusion of emotional and agitated characters, even when the script requires these characters to be emotional and agitated. Diderot’s paradox is akin to Gao’s neutrality, especially in the sense that actors must be detached from their own performance to avoid bombastic excess and become spectators of their own acting. This control over emotional expression and its excess is present in both Diderot and Gao. The difference lies in Gao emphasizing self-awareness, what he considers the inner space of the self, rather than just external control. He plays up the idea of “inner vision,” or seeing from the inside, i.e., from the point of view of consciousness. He once explained that in painting the artist exerts control over the self through observation, using a consciousness in the second person, “you,” to observe the self, “I.” The “you” extracted from the self watches over “I” as well as the painting, which makes up a superimposed visual image. The space thus created is no longer real space but one that exists inside the artist, and the resultant image becomes an inner vision. Art is not a direct presentation of the self; nor is it a representation of reality, but something that is the outcome of the observation of “you” over “I,” a product of the self being otherized.22 In the theater, the inner space of the actor allows for the development of the neutral actor and the Third Eye, and both act as guides when adopting a feeling about the character. The actor is highly aware of how the character is being presented onstage, and thus avoids the blind

Nonattachment and Gao Xingjian’s Neutral Actor

107

and uncontrolled excesses of character identification. It is the neutral actor, not the character, who acts as the medium between the actor and the audience. In this sense, Gao’s idea of the theater can be understood as actor-centered, as it emphasizes the inner feeling of the actor and eschews the focus on the character as in psychological realism. Furthermore, by achieving neutral status, the actor can engage in a two-way communication with the audience and not merely serve as the vehicle for emotional expression. Whereas Diderot advocates a stationary position for the actor on the outside, Gao gives the actor agency to move in and out of a character according to the situation, and at times identify with, though not be totally immersed in, the character being played. Actors are thus accorded the freedom to control their own performances. On television and in movies, there is an abundance of so-called realistic acting imitating daily living. There is no need for the audience to see this kind of acting onstage. Theater stirs hearts because there is real communication between the stage and the audience. This is what distinguishes theater from television and movies.23 Make-believe, or what Gao calls “theatricality,” is helpful—even essential—for communicating with the audience: in fact, an actor should highlight the act of pretending, as if to say to the audience, “Look how well I can pretend to be somebody else!” A good actor can create the illusion of genuine emotion and reproduce external signs of emotion, but does not need to experience the actual emotion. As in Peking Opera or kabuki, even though the actor focuses on performing a role, the actor’s identity is maintained throughout. The act of pretending is accentuated and coexists with direct actor–audience communication, in which the actor is the center and the disseminator of artistic awareness. The modern stage has come a long way since Stanislavskian psychological realism. The awareness that is a key element in Brecht’s epic theater also introduced the third-person narrator and highlighted stage narratology. Early in his career Gao was interested in Brecht, who might have inspired Gao’s use of the narrator in many of his plays. Whereas Brecht emphasizes

108

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

mainly the theater’s effect on the audience as sociopolitical beings, Gao turns toward pursuing a revival of theater as an art and as an expression of the individual’s soul. Brecht’s focus on ideology might have steered Gao toward a more purist conception of theatrical art, expressed through his antipathy toward political theater and his call for cold literature and the exploration of the self. His ideas on shifting points of view and the neutrality of the actor need to be examined in the light of the inner vision of man and how it is projected, both as testament to its own existence and as an impetus to inspire the audience, while at the same time rejecting outright any didactic or political message. Gao Xingjian’s idea of theater is inherent in and stems from his conception of the world of the play—a world that is focused on the awareness of the actor and the resultant portrayal of character, selfcontained in its make-believe, yet made expansive to involve the audience both emotionally and intellectually. Alongside the character-centered and audience-centered theories of Stanislavsky and Brecht, Gao Xingjian offers his unique version of actor-centered theory. The key words are “self-awareness” and “distance.” Freedom, according to Gao, is derived from self-awareness. When does self-awareness begin? It is when literature transcends social and political critiques and enters into an examination of the self.24 Gao’s notion of self-awareness is revealed as self-reflexivity or in relation to the world at large, i.e., how the world looks at the self; it can also be understood as self-observation in a nonattached manner. The relationship between the first-person self and “others,” in their divergent perspectives, hangs in a delicate balance, covering the whole spectrum of subjectivity and objectivity that results from the perception and awareness of “distance.” This potential for dramatic tension and conflict is part and parcel of Gao’s idea of the theater that encompasses both acting and playwriting. For Gao Xingjian, “distance” is important, because there must be a distance between life and art for the latter to transcend itself onto the level of human existence, or life in general.

Nonattachment and Gao Xingjian’s Neutral Actor

109

Despite his emphasis on the self of “I,” Gao warns against self-infatuation. He refuses to identify with the extreme individualism of the West and considers that the Superman-style of self-worship and heroism can only lead to disaster. He maintains that the artist must begin by affirming the individual, but must also possess the capacity for inner vision, and purify the self to become a Third Eye for a clear and lucid observation of the self.25 This “distanced” and “quiet observation” serves the same goal as shifting points of view and the neutral actor. Nonattachment is integral to Gao’s ideas on life and art. Nonattachment is both an attitude as well as an action aimed at providing a clear vision of society and life. Gao’s notions of “no-isms” and “cold literature” are derived from his understanding of nonattachment. His “no-isms” does not denote nothingness, but simply states that there are no inherent attachments or “isms.” Thus, one can come and go as one pleases, with or without rules, or one can set one’s own rules and extricate oneself from all control. The essence of nonattachment is that it is both positive and dynamic. Cold literature refuses to be drawn into any social or political movements. It distinguishes itself from “hot” literature with heated outcries and slogans that bellow for a specific cause; it is conducive to self-examination through quiet observation. It is the same with Gao’s famous concept of the shifting point of view. Here his focus moves from the actor to the character, who can be given a nomadic existence traveling between otherized selves. Shifting points of view essentially proceed from the subjective to the objective, from “I” to “you,” “he,” or “she.” The idea is to avoid self-obsession and the obscurity resulting from proximity. The shifting point of view makes use of distance to bring about clarity of vision and an objective perspective for a reflection of the many sides of the inner consciousness of the character. It is also a process of otherizing the self. In performance, it extends the distance between actor and character to facilitate the actor’s entrance into a state of neutrality. This is the relevance of shifting points of view to the tripartite actor.

110

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Nonattachment Gao’s contribution to theatrical discourse is his idea of the fluidity of the nature of acting and performing. Stanislavsky and Brecht created a tidy but limiting system of binary opposition, whereas Gao proposes a tripartite scheme of acting characterized by changeability and dynamism. For him, binary logic tends to simplify and formularize reasoning. There exists much space between and beyond the binary position of Stanislavsky’s psychological realism and Brecht’s alienation effect, and it is here that we find rich possibilities. The challenge is to transform these possibilities and make them viable and workable in life and in art.26 Gao thus goes further than the so-called “third space,” to the realm of fuzzy logic with no boundaries. In the same manner, the tripartite “stations” of the actor can coexist and interact. The actor is considered a nomadic identity who is, as it were, offered different “stations” to travel to and to stay at according to needs stipulated by observation of the performance scene, and the actor can even metaphorically be in two places at the same time. The self-aware actor is more than a craftsman, and is an artist involved in the act of creation.27 In Snow in August, Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch, cites from his Platform Sutra: And what do we mean by nonattachment? Nonattachment is in the self-nature of all humans. Our thoughts should not have any attachments. If all our thoughts, past, present and future, are linked together without any interruption, then the Dharmakaya, the essence body, will be able to detach itself from the Rupakaya, the physical body. When we are engaged in thinking, we should not be attached to anything. Even if only one thought is attached, all the others will be attached. This is known as bondage. If we can be detached from all thoughts, then we will not be burdened by any bondage.28

Nonattachment and Gao Xingjian’s Neutral Actor

111

The idea of Zen (Chan) Buddhist nonattachment is closely related to “no thoughts.” Thinking should be free. One should not be bound by thoughts or “burdened by any bondage.” In fact, one should sublimate thoughts to arrive at the realm of emptiness, so that our essence body (consciousness) can be detached from our physical body. It is not difficult to see the analogy between this and Gao’s idea of the neutral actor, where the actor is required to sublimate his everyday self to a state of being that has been purged and is nonattached. Nonattachment is one of the salient features of Chan Buddhism. It is by itself a neutral concept, because it could be pandetachment as well as panattachment, which is to say, with a thorough understanding of life one can accept all things. Thus, one need not escape, and one should not be insistent. As Gao says, “Zen releases the body from habit and bondage.”29 It extricates us from our predicament and traps, thus according us freedom.30 A person can be free and easy, achieving a state of “nonbinding” freedom. Similarly, the actor should be “nonattached” to both the actor’s everyday self and the self of the character; the neutrality so established allows the actor to freely enter or exit the character being played. With the Third Eye looking in from the outside, the performance, the relationship with other actors and with the audience, should all be scrutinized by the actor. The actor must transcend subjectivity, i.e., no longer be “attached” to the “I” consciousness—the range of vision must be broadened to include you, him, her for self-observation without obstruction. In acting, the neutral actor represents freedom.31 According to Cairns,32 “the very technique of Zen art is artlessness, or the ‘controlled accident.’ Most great acting looks so easy, almost effortless. It is of course, the art that conceals art.” In the same manner, Gao has no intention of dwelling on notions of realism or nonrealistic representation. He prefers the theater and the actor to be embodiments of the principle of nonattachment, always ready to accept new assignments and new challenges to devise new and more appropriate means of expression for the individual.

112

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

The art of acting is not the experience of emotion but the conscious acting of the emotion, thus creating an illusion of authenticity. A great actor presents to the audience the external sign of emotion.33 That is why Gao finds artistic kinship with Peking Opera acting. The actor and the audience, who not only respond to displays of emotion but also are joined by the sharing of illusion, thus communicate with each other through a common channel of meanings. Self-awareness as shaped by Gao’s nonattachment guides and cultivates more deeply the expression of emotion onstage. The neutral actor is both self-aware and liberated in body and mind, and represents part of Gao’s search for a new grammar for the contemporary stage: nonattachment to a specific “station” is better suited to the ever-changing world of theater. This type of performance art is more than mere immersion of the actor in the emotional makeup of the character. It is analytical, intuitive and intelligent, and belongs to a different and moreover a sublimated plane of theatrical art.

Nonattachment and Gao Xingjian’s Neutral Actor

113

Notes 1. Jacques Copeau and Claude Sicard, Registres, VI, L’école du Vieux-Colombier (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 34. 2. Gaeteno Oliva, “Education to Theatricality and Neutral Mask: PsychoPedagogical Approach,” Creative Education 7 (2016): 1657, http://file. scirp.org/pdf/CE_2016072718361238.pdf. 3. Sears A. Eldredge and Hollis W. Huston, “Actor Training in the Neutral Mask,” The Drama Review 22, no. 4 (1978): 21. 4. Murray Simon, Jacques Lecoq (New York: Routledge, 2003), 141. 5. Simon, Jacques Lecoq, 75. 6. Gao Xingjian and Fang Zixun, On Drama (Taipei: Lianjing, 2010), 168– 169. 7. Jacques Lecoq, cited in “Neutral Mask,” CITA/ International for Theatre Arts, http://internationalcita.com/neutral-mask/, retrieved February 23, 2017. 8. Gao and Fang, On Drama, 81. 9. Ibid., 175. 10. Ibid., 81–82. 11. Ibid., 58. 12. Ibid., 170–171. 13. Ibid., 170–171. 14. Ibid., 58. 15. Ibid., 175. 16. Ibid., 187. 17. Ibid., 57. 18. Gao Xingjian, The Case for Literature (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 2001), 136, 142. 19. Gao and Fang, On Drama, 178. 20. Denis Diderot and Walter Herries Pollock, The Paradox of Acting, trans. from Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883). 21. Paul Kuritz, The Making of Theatre History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988), 207. 22. Gao, The Case for Literature, 140. 23. Gao and Fang, On Drama, 158.

114

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

24. Gao Xingjian, “Freedom and Literature,” in his Freedom and Literature (Taipei: Lianjing, 2014), 54. 25. Gao and Fang, On Drama, 34. 26. Gao, “Freedom and Literature,” 55. 27. Gao, The Case for Literature, 141. 28. Gao Xingjian, Snow in August (Taipei: Lianjing, 2000), 76–77. 29. Gao and Fang, On Drama, 152–153. 30. Ibid., 157–158. 31. Ibid., 156. 32. Adrian Cairns, “Zen and the Art of Acting,” New Theatre Quarterly 2 (1986): 27. 33. Kuritz, The Making of Theatre History, 207.

Chapter 8

Gao Xingjian’s Search for a Scenic Dramaturgy and Cinematic Language in Song of the Night Mary Mazzilli

Song of the Night (2007), first staged by the SourouS Company in 2010, exemplifies a type of total theater that celebrates the use of music, dance, and visual spectacle.1 It is, in fact, in this script that we find the roots and ramifications of an eclectic artistic career, one that sees Gao Xingjian venture not only into drama and prose but also into fine art and cinema. This chapter, therefore, aims to define the scenic dramaturgy of this work, which marks a rite de passage in Gao’s career, one that has led him to leave theater behind, at least for the moment. It will do this by considering Song of the Night as a scenic composition made of movements,

116

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

music, and verbal virtuosity that reminds us not only of Huang Zuolin’s legacy of a xieyi theater but also of Gao’s ability to conceive a cinematic language that can no longer be contained onstage. What is Gao’s scenic pictorial dramaturgy? How does Gao develop a cinematic language in this script? These are the two main questions to be answered by looking at both Gao’s play text and the 2010 SourouS Company production.

Song of the Night: The Script Like many of Gao’s plays, this script has no linear narrative. At first glance, Song of the Night is a female character’s account of walking at night through desolate city streets. The opening lines of the text present it as an old and sad song that “still reverberates today,”2 which introduces, from the outset, the musical element. By looking at the cast’s brief in the script, it is possible to better understand how the play works. The script lists among the cast one female actor, two dancers (one designated “melancholic dancer” and the other “vivacious dancer”), and one musician (who is mainly playing the saxophone). In Lee’s translation, the two dancers and the female actor portray a single character, “an image of contemporary woman: ‘She.’”3 However, the script distinguishes between “Female Actor,” playing the role of the narrator, and “She.” According to Lee, in the role of Female Actor the performer would be addressing the audience, and the role of She represents the unifying image of contemporary woman.4 In the script the two voices are differentiated: Female Actor seemingly recounts the physical journey of the character through the streets, i.e., describes the external ambience of the physical space, while She talks about the internal emotional journey of the character. If on the page Female Actor and She appear as two distinct voices, onstage both roles are played by one performer, and in some cases the change between roles is quite sudden. For one performer to play both requires considerable skill to shift between the two roles, and the script indicates a split of personality and multiple perspectives. One could consider Female Actor as communicating an external perspective

Scenic Dramaturgy and Cinematic Language

117

of the character talking to the audience, and She as communicating an internal perspective, with the character talking to herself. In this sense, a rough narrative can be identified if we consider that Female Actor initially sets the scene and presents the situation, then She takes over the middle section as emotions intensify, until the final part returns to Female Actor. The script delineates a physical journey of the female character in city streets at night, but at the same time it is also an emotional journey that presents the character facing a dilemma. The dilemma can be traced to the words of the character, who questions the role of women and in relationships with men. The central part of the script, which is mainly presented through She, indicates the character’s attempt to rebel against men as she declares a war against them while flying a big banner.5 This dilemma is reiterated by the role of the dancers representing two contrasting moods—melancholic and vivacious—which further duplicates the personality split between Female Actor and She. The dilemma can be seen in the choice of the two contrasting moods, possibly translating inactivity and activity, suffering and ecstasy. However, such a distinction between the functions of the two dancers is not always definite, especially because they are also described as dancing together in duets. Moreover, one should not forget the role of the male musician. The fact that the role is scripted as such is telling. In the central section of the script, the imagined revolt against men is rendered visually by the interaction of the two dancers and the musician: the dancers tie the man up with a length of cloth, each holding one end. They drag him offstage, then reappear with a big banner, representing the women’s revolt against men.6 Once the revolt is over, the musician is back onstage playing a happy tune.7 A pivotal moment in the play is when the two dancers, who never speak in the script, address She.8 After this brief exchange, there is in a circular fashion a return to a normality that sees She choosing to venture into a new relationship with a man, “a forbidden date,” as the night gives way to dawn. Lee points out that Gao is describing how women “concede” to “the biologically

118

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

programmed mutual desire for sex between men and women.”9 The gender stance of the script is not the focus of this paper, so it is not necessary to comment further on the issue. Suffice it to say that the ending concludes the journey of the female character through a solitary night walk into a new day. The night walk sees her questioning her condition and her relation to men, possibly facing an existentialist dilemma between suffering and ecstasy, and the new dawn sees her heading for work; what remains of the night is “the shadow of someone who is dreaming.”10 From the analysis of the different moments unfolding in the script, of the role of the different performers as described in the script and as related to the theme of the play—woman versus man—two elements emerge that will help define the dramaturgy of the work. One important element is the function of nontextual aspects of the play, the role of the dancers and the musician within the visual texture of the script and their theatrical potential onstage, which exemplifies the idea of total theater. Another element is that of the split personality of the character identified as Female Actor and She and as duplicated by the role of the two dancers. This not only problematizes the role of She, which is presented as unifying, but also questions the textuality of the script, which reflects a cinematic approach.

Total Theater and Scenic Dramaturgy The script is described by Conceison as un spectacle de danse (a dance show) or “dance drama” (wuju),11 and Song of the Night is seemingly a hybrid theatrical form, partly dance composition, partly drama, exemplifying the idea of total theater. This can be seen in the use of music and dance, as well as in the acting, in the performance, what Gao himself calls le théâtre holistique, a theory based on the idea that man is an indivisible whole.12 Unlike other of Gao’s postexile plays presenting nontextual characters, Song of the Night can be seen to be closer to such works as Snow in August, a modern opera, in that it gives prominence to movement and musical elements. For instance, while in Between Life and Death,

Scenic Dramaturgy and Cinematic Language

119

closer to Song of the Night in content and theme, the dancers are limited to the background of the main female character, in Song of the Night there are quite a few sequences where the dancers perform either solos or duets that seemingly have a life of their own. This is because, unlike in other of his plays, in this script Gao does not describe the movement of the roles, which are left to the director, potential choreographer, or performers. Moreover, the interaction between the male musician and the two dancers as they wrap him up and drag him away has a theatrical resonance that well clarifies visually the sense of revolt that is rhythmically nuanced in the script. Female Actor talks about something “shrill” that is “suffocating” her; she must “deal with the terror and the groaning” by “grinding it into dust.”13 This is a crescendo toward calling on women to revolt. In my considerations of Gao’s postexile plays, I have argued that the concept of total theater is the key to reading this script, and also that Gao has strong connections to Antonin Artaud, one of the original promoters of total theater.14 Defining a “holistic assimilation of individual performers” and the possibility of the spiritual with nature,15 Artaud talks about a kind of theater that privileges the use of the theatrical language of light, color, movement, gesture, and space, and signals a return to “popular, primal theater sensed and experienced directly by the mind, without language’s distortion and pitfalls in speech and words.”16 It is a “pure” form of theater or “total theater” that can have a powerful impact on the audience. The effect of seeing the male musician dragged offstage by the two dancers, then the two dancers arranging the banner made of rags and a string of underwear and sheets,17 is further amplified by the duet that augments the anger in the words of She to incite revolt and change. In the middle section of the play the movement and visual elements are used to best effect. Total theater can also be traced to the “complete drama” approach of Chinese traditional theater, which makes use of a wide theatrical spectrum of singing, reciting, playing, and acrobatics.18 Chen Jide’s

120

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

definition of “complete drama”19 alludes to the cross-cultural nature of Chinese modern theater that incorporates Western elements and Chinese traditional drama. The strong focus on dance sequences is kept throughout Song of the Night as the two dancers serve the function of embodiment, materializing the emotions of She through dance movements. In addition to the dance sequences, the music mentioned at the start of the play in the Female Actor’s remark about an old sad song is personified by the male musician, who also witnesses the action onstage and the textual lyricism of the verse form. The male musician is introduced a bit later and is at first only seen playing in the background. However, as with the two dancers, he is seen interacting with the protagonist, staring at her, whistling at her,20 reacting with a smile or a grimace,21 reacting to She’s complaints directed toward men. Like with the two dancers, as he is seen entering and exiting the stage the music changes, corresponding to mood changes in the text. For instance, as She and Female Actor criticize and question whether men have the sensitivity to understand women, the musician is seen to stop playing music.22 In this regard, one could argue that the male musician plays another character, who, representing the male gender, engages in a form of indirect dialogue that only works through music. Here we find a strong similarity with the role of Man in the play Between Life and Death, who responds only through movements to the accusations of Woman. Despite the similarities, within the context of the highly physical, movement-based experience, one could argue that the role of the male musician is more prominent, as also proven by the scene with the two dancers. Furthermore, the musical sensory experience that his instrument creates is also reflected in the poetic nature of the language and the textual references to auditory elements, such as song; to the noise of the city, of the seagulls; to sounds that become reflective of the mood of the character as demonstrated in the passage below: Female actor: There’s a sound Under my feet I go to pick it up

Scenic Dramaturgy and Cinematic Language

121

[…] Something is moaning Something is shrill23 Such a sensory experience is created by both extratextual and textual elements. In terms of genre, even though located between dance and theater, Song of the Night is still heavily textual with a constant use of monologues: in the case of Female Actor directed to the audience, in the case of She directed to herself. This is so in many other of Gao’s postexile plays such as Between Life and Death. The use of monologues connects him to a postdramatic dramaturgy that can be defined as postepic and pictorial.24 A “postepic” narration is a type of narration whose account is being given, “narrated, reported, casually communicated.”25 Lehmann describes this kind of device thus: “Here the theater is oscillating between extended passages of narration and only interspersed episodes of dialogue; the main things are the description and the interest in the peculiar act of the personal memory/narration of the actors.”26 Monologies, or long expositive speeches, are used to probe into a character’s feelings and thoughts and to reinforce the perception of a real “now” through the direct involvement of the audience. In this regard, first, She cannot be seen—she is merely accounts that are directly expressed in words—and hence is a kind of dramaturgy that has lost its representational function. Second, the fact that Female Actor, defined metanarratively as a performer devoid of psychological depth, fulfills a functional performative role by breaking the fourth wall in a Brechtian fashion as she addresses the audience, defines the role as no longer playing characters but being reduced to an “apostrophe on the theatron axis.”27 “Monologies” can be considered not as a confessional tool but as “symptom and index” of a functional displacement of characters onstage being reduced to mere performers. The use of monologies defines a kind of theater beyond the dramatic, where language spoken onstage is no longer mimesis and is no longer dialogue. In this sense, the focus is

122

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

on the very moment of the events, the actions, beyond the “traces of meaning or cultural meaning.”28 Answering the first question regarding the pictorial dramaturgy of Gao’s script, one can define a dramaturgy that has lost a representational function. The pictorial element can be further considered in relation to postdramatic theater as exemplified by Lehmann’s analogy of a painting: “The seemingly ‘static’ painting, too, is in reality merely the now ‘definite’ state of the congealed pictorial work, in which the eye of the viewer wanting to access the picture has to become aware of and reconstructs its dynamic and process.”29 The dynamic he refers to is not a “dramatic” but rather a “scenic” process, defined by the painting analogy that stresses the self-referential nature of a kind of theater that brings attention to its own construct. The spectator is aware of the painting’s creative process and plays an active role in extracting meaning from the theatrical experience, reconstructing this very process. This is the case of this script, where the spectator must work out the link not only between the different images that the performer playing two roles describes but also between these and the dance/musical sequences accompanying them. In this sense, Song of the Night can be considered a large canvas to decipher and reconstruct. The painting analogy is also a reminder of Gao’s own practice as a painter, and the connection through Huang Zuolin to the concept of xieyi as a painting and theatrical technique. Huang Zuolin’s idea of xieyi in theater stands for “a form of art mediation that aims at transcending language or any other medium”30 and directly influenced Gao’s theater. Huang Zuolin’s notion of xieyi is useful for understanding the performance dynamics of Song of the Night: “Another method Huang used to endow spoken theater with the xieyi feature of flexibility was the creation of a multi-dimensional structure of time and space on stage, an interlocking construction in a single scene of different time and space sequences.”31

Scenic Dramaturgy and Cinematic Language

123

Huang’s sculpturality refers to a multidimensional construct where different time and spatial dimensions are presented onstage. This is exemplified in the script not only by using different media, music, dance, and spoken word but also by the different perspectives rendered by different performers onstage. This multidimension is the multivocality that Conceison refers to when talking about this script and will help define the cinematic language of the work: “In Ballade nocturne, the split subjectivity of the female protagonist is further manifested in the bodies of at least three performers: one actress identified as ‘Actress’ and two dancers (one “Lively” and one “Melancholy”) who share the role of ‘She.’”32 Conceison asserts that the role of the two dancers and the presence of three performers is an embodiment of split subjectivity, whereas I use the term “hallucination” to further define the multivocality of Gao’s theater and to address the connection between actors and spectators, which is a concern of a postdramatic dramaturgy.

Hallucination and Cinematic Language In my study Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays, referencing Between Life and Death and focusing on the performer–spectator relationship, I define hallucination as what is “framed as an illusion, aware of their own unreality but pointing to a supposed reality.”33 My definition is based on a study by Maaika Bleeker that questions Lehmann’s ideas and asserts that the “multiplication of frames”34 increases “perceptibility of the thing in itself.”35 She proposes that the use of several perspectives “turned seeing into an experience akin to hallucination.”36 On the one hand, this leaves the spectator to decide what is actually presented onstage and what is the projection of “their own fantasies, desires, fears and imagination.”37 On the other hand, it reinforces the creation of a fictional illusion. The idea of hallucination resonates with Gao’s idea of jiadingxing,38 where a suppositional, hypothetical reality is expressed through the performer/

124

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

role/spectator relationship, which points to the creation of hallucination through the multivocality created by the voices of the character/performer and the involvement of the spectator. Film theorist and critic André Bazin refers to hallucination as “an image of nature and as facts” in photography,39 which he links to the idea of realism in cinema: “Filmic realism must include hallucination. [...] Filmic realism can only be a reconciliation with the world if it integrates not just the ‘power of the false,’ as Deleuze said, but the experience that precedes the distinction of the true and the false.”40 Hallucinations show what precedes reality (“the experience that precedes the distinction of the true and the false”) and reality itself (“the world”) and are rendered through a cinematic style that treats images equally, rejecting the use of montage and editing and opting for a more “democratic” use of a collage of images.41 In Gao’s script, hallucinations are rendered through multivocality where all elements are evenly weighted, as exemplified by the use of a split subjectivity for the protagonist. An insight in the SourouS Company’s production and the differences between their production and the original conception of the script will reveal Gao’s democratic use of hallucinations. There were some radical changes to the cast in the 2010 production of the script as staged by the SourouS Company in Paris’s Théâtre de l’Épée de Bois and codirected by Marcos Malavia and Muriel Roland. The production presented four female performers onstage: one female persona playing She and Female Actor (Muriel Roland in this production) and a puppet player (Alicia Quesnel), who moved puppets around the stage—in place of the two dancers described in the script—and two female players (Carmela Delgadio and Corinne Hache, respectively) using a bandoneon and a piano in place of the male performer playing a single instrument. The monologues of She were sung rather than acted in what looked like a cabaret performance. Coulter laments that what he reads as “a lyrical piece on identity,” especially feminine identity, became in the production the representation of a “homosocial world.”42

Scenic Dramaturgy and Cinematic Language

125

Indeed, like Coulter, I find that the biggest difference between the production and the text is in the presentation of subjectivity, which is reflected in how multivocality and different levels of identification are employed. The added physicality and importance of movement sequences were part of a process of embodiment that displaced and added signification to the theatrical experience. However, this acquires a different effect in the production when puppets were used instead. The device of having puppets manipulated by another performer meant that the level of embodiment was reduced to contrived manipulated movements. In terms of subjectivity, the puppets represented “the other” to the female dramatis persona, an “external other” who was contrived and controlled, again by another performer, by another external self. A sense of separation, and power relations, isolated the protagonist onstage while, as also suggested by Conceison, the use of live performers, two other performers in addition to the main speaking performer, meant there would be sharing among the main speaking performer, the two dancers, and a possible music player. Two performers, instead of two puppets, onstage would share with the main actors, on an equal footing, the task of creating, splitting, and embodying the hallucination of the She character. Conversely, the text in its original setting is about the combination of moments of closeness and distance, which can also be found in the words of the monologies, where the third-, second-, and first-person pronouns are used: Female Actor: It happens that suddenly In the subway train She and you dear are seated opposite.43 This quote from the beginning of the script defines a split personality, which at first sight can signify the image of the woman looking at herself, not from the “I” self but through the “you” confronting an external self. However, the script notes specify that while “‘you,’ ‘I’ and ‘she’ all refer to the female protagonist,” the expressions “you dear” and “all of

126

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

you” are “directed at males in the audience.”44 Such a distinction, which in some cases is quite clear,45 is in others more ambiguous.46 Beyond this distinction, the use of different pronouns, highlighted also by the presence of a male musician onstage, creates a rhythm of closeness and distance between the split parts of herself (with the use of the three pronouns) and herself and men in general. In this regard, SourouS Company’s theatrical solution denies a male presence onstage, and hence closeness and distance between the protagonist and men. Secondly, the production stresses distance rather than closeness, a plurality and multiplicity achieved by using manipulated puppets, which I would argue somewhat contradicts SourouS Company’s intention of reproducing the “choral interiority” of Gao’s script.47 In fact, choral interiority is the key to reading this play. I would argue that “choral” stands for a Nietzschean understanding of chorus,48 a unity that is anti-individualist in its indeterminacy and in which interiority stands for subjectivity. Choral interiority is in the split subjectivity, which points to a plurality that is not only linguistic but also physical and musical. It is a plurality that indicates division as well as unity, whereas in this production it is only about a plurality that is divided and fragmented. Choral interiority is the cinematic hallucination that is connected to the real where all elements are weighted on an equal footing. As mentioned above, She and Female Actor can be considered paired with vivacious dancer and melancholy dancer. Female Actor is the one presenting She to the audience as She speaks more subjectively, in the same way as vivacious dancer carries and pushes melancholy dancer. We can identify an excess of perspectives, for example in the use of different pronouns, the splitting of voices, and embodiment through the physical movements of additional performers. It is in the excess of perspectives, however, where, following Bleeker’s argument, the distance between performer and spectator is further reduced because the excess re-creates fictionality, hallucination that has an internal unity. In the script this is reinforced by a cyclic closure, a return to the start of the

Scenic Dramaturgy and Cinematic Language

127

play, with the video projection of endless numbers of people in the street. By clearly indicating the use of the video projection in the script,49 Gao is intentionally making a connection with an outside extratheatrical reality, which serves even further to reinstate a fictional illusion, a seemingly cinematic hallucination.

Concluding Remarks It is no coincidence that Song of the Night is the last dramatic work Gao Xingjian has written to date, as in the last decade he has instead mainly focused on painting and creating cine-poems. Not only do the function of nontextual elements, the role of the dancers and the musician within the visual texture of the script and their theatrical potential onstage, exemplify the idea of total theater but also, combined with the use of split personality, they create almost cinematic hallucinations that define a unity, bridging a choral interiority to the multiplicity of perspectives in a collage-type composition. Answering the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter, in this play Gao refines a scenic postdramatic dramaturgy and, in tune with Bazin’s idea of cinema, renders cinematic hallucinations onstage.

128

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Notes 1. Even though this play can be considered one of Gao’s latest, he wrote a first draft in French in 1999 that was published in a revised version with the title Ballade nocturne in 2007. See Mabel Lee’s “Introduction,” in Gao Xingjian, City of the Dead and Song of the Night, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong and Mabel Lee (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2015), xxi. The script was translated into English from the French by Claire Conceison and published in 2010. Lee produced an English translation of the Chinese version (written in 2009 after the French version) that was published in English as Song of The Night in Gao, City of the Dead and Song of the Night. This chapter will mainly refer to Lee’s translation from the Chinese, as it is the most recent, and will consider the 2010 SourouS Company production of the play from the French. 2. Gao, Song of the Night, 65. 3. Ibid., 64. 4. Lee, “Introduction,” xxi. 5. Gao, Song of the Night, 68. 6. Ibid., 73–76. 7. Ibid., 80. 8. Ibid., 80. 9. Lee, “Introduction,” xxii. 10. Gao, Song of the Night, 84. 11. Claire Conceison, “The French Gao Xingjian, Bilingualism, and Ballade nocturne,” Hong Kong Drama Review 8 (2009): 301. 12. Gao Xingjian, La Neige en août (Arles: Actes Sud, 2005), 18. 13. Gao, Song of the Night, 76. 14. Mary Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015). 15. C. Innes, Avant Garde Theater: 1892–1992 (London: Routledge, 2003), 61. 16. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (London: John Calder, 1958), 70. 17. Gao, Song of the Night, 76–77. 18. Izabella Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre: From the Word to the Image (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 20. 19. Chen Jide, Contemporary Chinese Avant-Garde Plays, 1979–2000 (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2003), 204.

Scenic Dramaturgy and Cinematic Language 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

129

Gao, Song of the Night, 70. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 75. Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays, x. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 1. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 109. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 68. Henry Y.H. Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre (London: SOAS University Press, 2000), 170. Ronnie Bai, “Dances with Brecht: Huang Zuolin and His ‘Xieyi’ Theatre,” Comparative Drama 33, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 345. Conceison, “The French Gao Xingjian,” 301. Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays, 79. Maaika Bleeker, “Look Who’s Looking!: Perspective and the Paradox of Postdramatic Subjectivity,” Theater Research International 1 (March 2004): 29. Bleeker, “Look Who’s Looking!,” 30. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 40. “The term jiadingxing here refers to a type of acting where the actor returns to storytelling and, from that point of view, he/she enters the role of the character he/she is performing; by doing so, he/she works through his/her own acting self and the role of the character but maintains some kind of neutrality in performing it. Actors’ actions shape the location through appealing to the audience’s imagination and not through the physicality of objects.” Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays, 23. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1: 16. Jean-Francois Chevrier, “The Reality of Hallucination in André Bazin,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, ed. Andrew Dudley and Joubert-Laurencin Herve (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 45. Chevrier, “The Reality of Hallucination,” 47. Todd J. Coulter, Transcultural Aesthetics in the Plays of Gao Xingjian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 120.

130

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

43. Gao, Song of the Night, 66. 44. Ibid., 64. 45. “When you dear think she is yours/She will have escaped/And you dear will only know” (Gao, Song of the Night, 67). 46. A passage such as “You dear hear at the bottom if your hearts/Seagulls flapping their wings/but she already has her head down” (Gao, Song of the Night, 66) does not clearly refer to a male presence. Moreover, the audience would not have such a clear understanding of this distinction unless it was stressed by the performer. 47. In their dossier for the production, SourouS Company explain that there was an emphasis on the multidisciplinary approach by using songs, music, movement, puppetry, and video projection, which reflects the “choral interiority of Gao’s writing” (intériorité chorale) (2010 “Ballade nocturne (Théâtre musical), Dossier”: 2). 48. Nietzsche privileges the use of a chorus because the chorus functions as one entity, the presence of Dionysius, and through it the audience can experience the horror of individuation and primal unity. See D. Jaggard, “Dionysius versus Dionysius,” in Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, ed. Paul Bishop (Suffolk: Camden House, 2004), 281. 49. Gao, Song of the Night, 84.

Chapter 9

Two Gao Xingjian Exhibitions Launched Simultaneously in Brussels during 2015 Liu Zaifu

I have been writing about Gao Xingjian’s fiction, plays, literary critiques, and poetry for more than three decades but, while admiring his paintings and trying to appreciate them, I had always thought of them as not being integral to the main thrust of his spirit and creativity. However, not long after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, I found myself constantly startled and amazed by his paintings and began to sense a growing need to better understand the significance of his art. In autumn 2014, sponsored by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, he and I were invited to engage in large-scale public dialogues on literature at three university campuses in Hong Kong. In our

132

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

private conversation, Gao Xingjian said that in early 2015 two of his major art events would be launched simultaneously in Brussels: at the Museum of Ixelles, a three-month retrospective exhibition to showcase the history and achievement of his art, and at the Belgian Royal Museums of Fine Arts, his new series of large-scale works, The Awakening of the Consciousness, would go on permanent exhibition. Gao Xingjian’s six works at the Royal Museums explore intangible psychological states—Subconscious, Illusion, Impulse, Introspection, Somewhere Else, and Bewilderment—and with the retrospective at the Museum of Ixelles, the Gao Xingjian art events taking place in Brussels were the most significant in his life. He was deeply moved by the Belgian aesthetic sensibilities that had honored his art in this profound manner. The two exhibitions were launched in late February 2015, and soon afterward I was projected onto a steep curve learning about Gao Xingjian’s art. Gao Xingjian had relocated to Paris in the late 1980s, precisely when the Western art world was embroiled in fierce controversy about what constituted contemporary art. I was in France as a member of a delegation of Chinese writers, and when he and I met we often discussed the Western contemporary art scene. He had no interest in trends and fashions, and was intent on establishing his own path in literature and art. In fact, his fiction and plays already showed evidence he was succeeding, yet I had failed to detect the same success occurring in his painting. Since 1988 his paintings were being exhibited in major art museums in Europe, Asia, and the United States, and his work was frequently included in major art fairs and group exhibitions. He has held more than eighty solo exhibitions, and the dozens of magnificent books of his paintings that have been published over the decades testify to his significance as an artist. The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium made an extraordinary contractual decision by acquiring for the permanent collection and exhibition Gao Xingjian’s The Awakening of the Consciousness. This was a rare event in Western contemporary art history, and could be considered special treatment reserved for world-acclaimed classical artists. On the

Gao Xingjian Exhibitions

133

floor above Gao Xingjian’s dedicated hall are exhibition halls for European masters such as Rubens and Rembrandt. Significantly, the launch and media conference for Gao Xingjian’s work and Chagall’s Retrospective took place in parallel. Why does Gao Xingjian’s art have a special attraction for Western critics and connoisseurs? Museum Director Beate Reifenscheid offers an explanation in the catalogue of Gao Xingjian’s exhibition La Fin du monde held at the Ludwig Museum, Germany, in 2007. She writes: Gao chooses a form that tends towards a quasi-absence of form and therefore has the advantage of different visual possibilities. Virtually abstract, it is never concrete, and never indicates a meaning. Instead it plays with the potential for evolution that can be found in everyone’s soul: it could be designated as buried images. By using the original language of the spirit and common sense, it has the power to transcend all linguistic barriers, and by utilizing a varied range of black, gray, and white, Gao summons forth a palette so rich that there is no risk of regretting the lack of color. These shades seem at the same time to be relatively detached and yet close.1 Reifenscheid refers to a broad region that Gao Xingjian had found inbetween figurative and abstract. In that region are not visible people and scenery but invisible, ephemeral “thoughts.” Gao discovered this region and, “by making use of his latent potential to summon forth feelings, he summons forth images from the soul’s subconscious.” Indeed, these are invisible images of the subconscious, but just as theater can manifest invisible mental images onto a stage, Gao Xingjian manifests the invisible subconscious onto the surface of the painting. This is unprecedented in the history of painting. Gao Xingjian himself has written in detail about his discovery. In his preface to the catalogue accompanying his exhibition at the Snite Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, in 2007, he wrote:

134

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics Between figurative and abstract exists a vast region waiting to be explored and to be discovered. If it is maintained that the figurative arises from the imitation of reality and its representation in painting, then the abstract seeks to express concepts and feelings. Figurative and abstract are the two main methods used in painting. However, my painting searches in another direction, that is, it seeks to evoke associations, and it neither portrays external landscapes or objects nor does it use painting as a means for the outpouring of emotions, it instead depicts visions of the inner mind.2

These visions of the inner mind are not divorced from images, but their imprecise details leave space for the imagination that induces viewers to think. As the realm of thoughts is larger than the realm of images, the surface of the painting acquires depth, and the psychological space so produced allows the painting to transcend the two dimensions of the flat surface. This is not the same as the perspective found in traditional painting. For Gao Xingjian’s 2009 exhibition Depois do dilúvio (After the Flood), the general manager of Würth Portugal, Nuno Dias, wrote perceptively in the catalogue: If he had been born some centuries earlier, Gao Xingjian would, without doubt, have been a Renaissance artist. He paints, makes films and writes in a number of genres: novels, poetry, essays and even operas. ... Gao has always refused to be the flag-bearer for any cause. The only commitment that he accepts is that of art itself: an aesthetic vertigo, which, taking the path of singularity and authenticity, gives a universal dimension to his work. Gao Xingjian is a humanist, preoccupied with existence; a tolerant and understanding man who is trying to untangle complexity through his pictorial, literary and film creations. He is an artist who is able to reach out to the world through the simplicity of the forms through which he transmits the essence of the soul.3

Gao Xingjian Exhibitions

135

Indeed, Gao Xingjian’s unique probing into art creation led to his finding that pristine region between figurative and abstract, and his code of action is always fully resourced by the solitary person who refuses to rely on any other external force. His uncompromising spirit means he does not attach himself to political parties, “isms,” or fashions, and that he does not replicate existing philosophies and art formulas. From the 1980s, when I first met him, he was pouring doubt on the theory of dualities by querying the opposition of two poles and the “negation of negation” that were then the height of fashion in dialectics. He said he valued Chan Buddhism’s “sole means to Buddhist enlightenment” and believed in Laozi’s “three gives rise to the myriad things.” For him “three” was more important than “two,” and only the philosophy of “three” could smash the ossified extremities of “two” (that is, death at the two extremities). “Three” includes the two extremities but does not fall into two extremities, and this makes it a broad path. His paintings travel along this broad road. He wants to follow this road that his predecessors have not traveled, and he insists on striding along this road that his predecessors did not dare to travel. His predecessors took it to be a different track and avoided it, whereas he regards it as normal and boldly set out to explore it. Gao Xingjian’s philosophy of freedom and his freedom of thought helped him to create his own road; whether in fiction, plays, or painting, it was always a path no one else had previously traveled. The French historian of literature and art as well as practicing artist Daniel Bergez published both French and English editions of his Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul in 2013.4 Bergez is absolutely correct in denoting Gao Xingjian as a painter of the soul: he paints “matter,” but he is not a “painter of matter.” He paints people, but he is not a “painter of people.” Emerging from his brush are not portraits, but people’s souls. What Gao Xingjian paints is best thought of not as “lacking in color” but instead as “emptiness,” and not “lacking in physical substance” but instead “being of the mind.” The soul includes both the conscious and the subconscious, and lies between the abstract and the figurative. Bergez writes of Gao:

136

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics His highly unique and original creation both extends and reinvents its twin origins. The artist renews and diverts the literati tradition of calligraphy and painting, by introducing abstraction and freeing it from literary reference. At the same time he dismisses the glibness and stereotypes of “modern” art. … While he creates works to be seen, he is not sensationalist; rather his contemplative works aim to engage the viewer’s heart and soul.5

As noted by Bergez, Gao Xingjian has subverted the two sources of his art: Chinese literati traditions and Western modern art traditions. He has exerted himself in absorbing from these sources but, rejecting the technique of dreamlike symbols, he has relied directly on the subconscious. I then read an excellent piece by the French art critic François Chapon in the Gao Xingjian Nouvelles oeuvres catalogue produced by Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris: Your pictorial independence stands apart from existing schools and techniques. This simplicity results from the distillation of great art; you have discovered—without our spatial rules and our limitations of time—the harmonies that moderate universal movement and their reverberations on unformed shadows of our consciousness. I admire your disengagement with dogmas, definitions, pacts and formulas, and your decisive leaping from the swamp of the known to ascend into a pristine and pure region.6 The website of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium welcomes the six works that Gao Xingjian had created for a dedicated exhibition hall for his monumental works titled The Awakening of Consciousness: The artist invites the wanderer to cross the image and to encounter, beyond the ink, the idea itself in its existential nudity … a space where the museums (re)devote themselves to contemplation. … Gao Xingjian, Frenchman of Chinese descent, considers himself a “go-between” between the Oriental world which forms the basis of his identity and the Occidental world of which he discusses the

Gao Xingjian Exhibitions

137

idea of modernity. His work also constitutes a gateway between painting and writing.7 Art critics strongly endorsed Gao Xingjian’s The Awakening of Consciousness in major Belgian newspapers. Writing in Le Soir, JeanMarie Wynants notes that Gao Xingjian’s works are created in Chinese ink, so there is an implied link with calligraphy, but in these works “the masterful deployment of Chinese ink transports the viewer into another universe where written or spoken words no longer apply.”8 Roger Pierre Turine writes in La Libre: hebdomataire belgique that “Gao Xingjian’s creations in literature, film, theater, and painting take us away from the world of mundane thoughts. … His works have titles that read like overtures to dream, they are beyond speech and nonspeech. Gao’s paintings do not explain, they have a life of their own, and are a connection between him and us.”9 Turine calls Gao’s six monumental new works for the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium “a prize to celebrate … a space of contemplation. … Presented are six invitations to penetrate beyond the image, the ink and the work. Visitors are confronted with their own truths, perhaps mirages and sometimes realities.” Professor Michel Draguet of the Université libre de Bruxelles is director general of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. His book Gao Xingjian: Le goût de l’encre established him as the leading authority on Gao Xingjian’s art, and it is not surprising that he has brought this major two-pronged Gao Xingjian project to fruition in Brussels.10 In his essay “Les pas perdus de Gao Xingjian,” Draguet alludes to Gao Xingjian’s outspoken claim that Western contemporary art has become hostage to thought, and that both conceptual art and sociological art are the result of “rampant consumerism” and “dry and superficial intellectual dogmatism.”11 In his view, while Gao’s painting is deeply anchored in his Chinese identity, from the West he has come to appreciate the “joy of liberation” in painting. He further notes that for Gao Xingjian painting is divorced from language and that to paint he enters a state of

138

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

forgetting language by sinking into “a universe woven by music until he forgets the self.” On the occasion of the two 2015 Gao Xingjian exhibitions in Brussels, Michel Draguet’s Gao Xingjian: Le goût de l’encre was released in a new edition bearing Draguet’s authoritative preface. Importantly, he asserts that Gao Xingjian is not “conservative” in his stance toward traditional Chinese painting, and that in the convergence of paper, ink, and water he has found the means to express complex sensations and feelings pertaining to the present: his explorations in art are driven by “contemporary issues.” In Gao Xingjian’s appropriation of genres from painting to writing, theater to music, poetry to opera to present his unique responses to existential questions, Draguet sees the ink as “thought in motion” that binds together sensual description and philosophical thought. Alluding to Gao’s The Awakening of the Consciousness, he notes that the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium has dedicated the entire space of the Bernheim Hall for Gao Xingjian to create this series of monumental works, which are “spiritual environments where the music of words and the sounds of speech respond to one another.” For him the series of paintings is also the crystallization of Gao Xingjian’s thoughts on his works for the theater as well as for cinema and opera. European art critics and scholars such as Draguet have discussed Gao Xingjian from the perspective of European art history. They have rated his paintings highly, and in addition have considered the unique aesthetic views he has arrived at as a part of art history. Gao Xingjian has clearly transcended the aesthetic parameters and art history views prevalent in the twentieth century by his opposition to the conscription of art to politics; by his not using social, political, or ethical judgments to replace aesthetic judgments; and by his providing a new direction for painting. In concluding his lengthy treatise “Another Kind of Aesthetics,” written in 1999, he offers a concrete solution to the malaise affecting the contemporary art world. It is this understanding of art that he is

Gao Xingjian Exhibitions

139

committed to exploring, and it is this understanding that has taken his paintings to great heights of achievement: Return to painting. Paint where painting is impossible. Where it is completed, start painting again. Return to painting. Search within art to find new possibilities for artistic expression, and search endlessly at the extremities of art. Return to painting. Be liberated from empty theory, and return concepts to language. Paint where talking fails, and paint where talk has finished.12 Translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee

140

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Notes 1. Beate Reifenscheid, preface in Gao Xingjian, La Fin du monde (Koblenz: Kerber, 2007), 9–18. 2. See Gao Xingjian, “Between Figurative and Abstract,” trans. Mabel Lee, in Gao, Between Figurative and Abstract (Notre Dame, IN: Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, 2007), n.p. 3. Nuno Dias, “The Pleasure of Contemplating the Images of a Great Writer,” in Gao Xingjian, Depois do dilúvio (Barcelona: El Cobre Ediciones, 2009), 17. 4. Daniel Bergez, Gao Xingjian: peintre de l’âme (Paris: Seuil, 2013), and Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul, trans. Sherry Buchanan (London: Asia Ink, 2013). 5. Daniel Bergez, preface to Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul. 6. François Chapon, preface to Gao Xingjian, Nouvelles oeuvres (Paris: Galerie Claude Bernard, 2014). 7. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium: www.fine-arts-museum.be/en/ exhibitions/gao-xingjian. 8. Jean-Marie Wynants, Le Soir (Belgique), March 4, 2015. 9. Roger Pierre Turine, La Libre: hebdomataire belgique, March 20, 2015. 10. Michel Draguet, Gao Xingjian: le goût de l’encre (Paris: Hazan, 2002; 2015). 11. Michel Draguet, “Les pas perdus de Gao Xingjian,” Esprit libre 9 (2003). 12. Gao Xingjian, “Another Kind of Aesthetics,” in Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012).

Chapter 10

The Mind’s Eye Subjectivity in Gao Xingjian’s Paintings Kwok-kan Tam Gao Xingjian understands the critical function of the vanishing point in Western oil painting that is used to generate a sense of perspective: this ingenious technique creates spatial depth. Confronting the criticism that traditional Chinese painting lacks perspective, he holds a different view, and argues: I am intrigued by the visual depth in Western painting. Even in my ink work in which my purpose is to capture impressions, I still try to create spatial depth. This is not the same as the use of perspective in Western painting. In modern Chinese painting, there is a theory called “multiple scattered perspectives.” Such a way to explain traditional Chinese art relies much on the Western concept, but it also provides some theoretical insights into the nature of Chinese art.1 Traditional Chinese art criticism lacks theoretical reflections on the use of perspective that could be considered comparable to the body of established works on Western painting. The notion of Chinese paintings having

142

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

“multiple scattered perspectives” is a modern concept that positions traditional Chinese painting against traditional Western painting: whereas the former has a “scattered” perspective, the latter has a “consistent” perspective. Such a comparison merely posits a single versus multiple perspective, and Gao Xingjian disputes that Chinese ink painting is simply an exercise in perspective; it is both a totally different exercise and a different mental conception.

Gao Xingjian’s Experiment with Perspective Concerning his own painting, Gao Xingjian affirms that he has his own method of solving the problem: “Perhaps, because I am Chinese, I am used to how impressions are captured on a flat surface in traditional Chinese painting,”2 and he proceeds to explain his method: I begin with the traditional Chinese method to achieve certain spatial depth in re-creating impressions. I realize I cannot rely on the convergence point [vanishing point] that I obtain in my observation of real objects. I must start with the inner depth in my mental formation of images, which does have some sense of perspective, but does not follow the rule of a convergence point in perspective, and neither is it multiple in perspective. When a person focuses on a certain mental image, the so-called distance becomes unstable, just like a camera cannot focus when it tries to shoot from somewhere dark. The lens simply moves back and forth because the autofocus function cannot determine what the focal distance is. This is only an analogy. By closing the eyes and meditating on mental phenomena, one finds what floats before the eyes does not have a fixed distance, and therefore does not follow the rule that the nearest object is larger and the farthest object is smaller. The problem I need to solve is how to capture mental images in a painting by not following the method of perspective in the representation of real objects.3 Gao Xingjian’s idea of painting, as stated above, is best illustrated in his work L’Observation (figure 3), in which layers of shade give form to

The Mind’s Eye

143

something that floats and swerves. There is no beginning and no ending, only a continuous movement that is registered in the painter’s eye. At any given moment, the viewer may find the painting looks like hard layers of wood, or layers of rock. However, the next moment it may appear as soft layers, fluid and changeable. This is an impression that changes according to the viewer’s perception. It is both the painter’s and the viewer’s observation. Distance and proportion do not work in this painting, as they are no longer relevant to moving mental pictures. Gao Xingjian designates the perception of depth evoked in this mental image as “pseudo-perspective.” According to him, “pseudo-perspective” can function to present the mental image in different layers and from different angles, and can also accommodate them in a single space so that they are unified in a picture. This picture lets the viewer see the different layers of spatial depth. The spatial depth thus created results from the random rendering of spatial relations and does not follow the principle of perspective. It is a sensory experience that relies on the painter’s immediate feelings. All objects move according to the painter’s change in feeling. The painter can be considered as painting shadows, not real objects, and therefore cannot measure the real dimensions of the objects. Nor can he paint according to a fixed source of light.4 The painting L’Observation illustrates these points well because it is an effort to capture the mood of the painter, who is in a fluid state of mind. The title L’Observation is a special reference to Gao Xingjian’s theory of art. As I have argued elsewhere,5 Gao Xingjian’s art in literary writing is inseparable from his aesthetics, in which he experiments with multiple and shifting subject positions in the portrayal and representation of his objects, be they characters or landscape. Landscape, as described in a painting or a novel, serves as a referent to the painter’s or the viewer’s observation that reflects their inner state of mind. Observation is more than observation of an object, for the object being observed serves as a mirror to reflect the viewer’s mind. Such observation is “self-transcendent observation,”6 which aims at achieving a higher level of consciousness.

144

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Figure 3. L’Observation, ink painting, 114 cm x 90.5 cm, 1994.

Source. Reprinted by permission of Gao Xingjian.

The Mind’s Eye Figure 4. Gao Xingjian, Minuit, 1995.

Source. Reprinted by permission of Gao Xingjian.

145

146

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

There is a conscious attempt in Gao Xingjian’s paintings to capture the mood that goes beyond the camera images in photography. As his works deal with mental images, they are devoid of color, and often appear in different shades of gray. For this reason, he prefers to use ink to present his images. In realistic depictions of objects, differences in the shade of gray result from the source of light and its intensity. But in mental images, especially those embedded in memory, shapes and color recur in repressed forms that are blurred. Gao Xingjian says: In my painting, I also use light to enhance the expressive power of ink. Unlike in Western paintings, I do not have a fixed source of light. For me, the enlightened mind can evoke different sources of light. When a person focuses on a certain image in his mind, the image or its periphery will be lit. The fusion of water and ink can produce such effects.7 Gao Xingjian’s painting Minuit (figure 4) illustrates the point that mental images do not show themselves from a fixed source of light. Instead, there are light sources in the foreground, middle ground, and background, separating the landscape into three zones. The foreground can be interpreted as land with some shapes of people or animals near a river, while the middle ground can be the other shore, distant and dismal, and shadows in the background hover with a moon surrounded by thick layers of clouds.

Mindscape in Painting Gao Xingjian’s paintings have recently been labeled “inner landscape” and “inner visions,”8 and he has been described as “a painter of the soul”9 and a painter of the “solitary world.”10 All such labels denote that Gao Xingjian characteristically paints objects that are emblematic of his emotions or feelings. In the exhibition The Inner Landscape: The Paintings and Films of Gao Xingjian , the curator Jason Kuo showcased more than

The Mind’s Eye

147

200 of Gao Xingjian’s ink paintings and film images that attempt to capture the psyche of the subject. Figure 5. Gao Xingjian, Dark Story, 2005.

Source. Reprinted by permission of Gao Xingjian.

In Dark Story/L’Histoire sombre (figure 5) the subject stands between two zones, the lighter one being the zone of the unreal, which is like a cave, while the darker one is the real. Hence, the subject seems to be on the point of entering the unreal from the real, but at the same time seems to remain outside, just watching. The lighter zone is fluid, unstable, and dynamic, and is in a state of undifferentiated chaos. Gao Xingjian once said:

148

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics My paintings can be viewed as landscape, but more than anything it is a reflection of my mindscape. At times, there is the notion of attaining to inner space. I yearn to depict my inner mindscape; this is simply all it is, although “simple” in this sense can appear to be a paradox.11

This image of a solitary man standing at the edge of a mind-cave is a motif in many of Gao Xingjian’s paintings. Hence, Jason Kuo used this image to highlight his exhibition “The Inner Landscape.” As Edmund Lee suggests, two qualities stand out in Gao Xingjian’s paintings: According to the artist [Gao Xingjian], the first is the heftier, darker coagulation of black ink, allowing the gradients between the various shades to become more distinct. “Pensée noire is a more sweeping example of this, as I attempt to centre the viewer’s mind [and] attention on one distinct, but ambiguous, source: a darker source that appears to derive from a localised surge of light, emerging from a backdrop.” The second is the more sensuous depiction of the human figures, with the rounder, softer brush strokes contrasting the lighter, somewhat linear, silhouettes in his previous paintings. In fact, such small and generally indistinct figures, inevitably engulfed in a vast and desolate landscape that is abstract in perspective, have been a recurrent sight in his works. “It is the idea of reclusion, to follow a singular pathway,” the artist elaborates on his signature arrangement. “These figures are viewed as vulnerable, which reminds us of what it is like to be human. We exist now, we create, and are of an infinite prowess to inspire and be inspired. But once our moment of existence passes, we will disappear.”12 The points Gao Xingjian makes about the mindscape in his paintings, as suggested by Edmund Lee, can best be seen in the following painting (figure 6), in which a lonely figure, deserted, stands between the hollow light gray and the solid dark gray, caught in a state of indecision and uncertainty. This is the landscape of an exile, as Jason Kuo remarks when commenting on Gao Xingjian’s paintings.13

The Mind’s Eye

149

Figure 6. Gao Xingjian, Suspense, 2007.

Source. Reprinted by permission of Gao Xingjian.

Daniel Bergez reads Gao Xingjian’s paintings in the context of his literary works (figures 6 and 7), particularly his novels Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible.14 This is an approach that critics such as Jason Kuo and Kwok-kan Tam have also adopted.15 “Inner landscape” is not only a key to understanding Gao Xingjian’s paintings, but a concept that illuminates hidden meanings of his Chan Buddhist approach to art. In an interview conducted for the French-speaking Bruzz radio station in Brussels, Gao Xingjian remarked: “One has to find harmony and a balance of space. My painting is not a reproduction of what exists, and neither is it self-expression: it’s more of an inner vision. It’s unreal,

150

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

mental, spiritual, imaginary, but there is a vision.”16 This gives a clue to Gao Xingjian’s techniques in his soul paintings. Figure 7. Painter of the Soul, 2015.

Source. Reprinted by permission of Gao Xingjian.

The Psychical Self Gao Xingjian’s literary works, as well as his artworks, are concerned with the self. The mindscapes are mental images that represent inner visions of the self. While the self is the subject of expression, it is also the object. It is the self that portrays and explores what is hidden in the self. In this sense, painting and literary writing are processes of soul searching involving the self’s inquiry and re-visioning. These processes seem to contradict each other. Since the unconscious is unknown, how can it be revealed? Regarding his method of soul searching, Gao Xingjian clarifies the processes involved: “Making full use of the methods of plastic art, we could then proceed to ‘view-find’ with the eye of the artist, for example, modulating color contrasts and tones according to emotional changes,

The Mind’s Eye

151

or crossing from black-and-white to different gradations of color, even to the point of color saturation.”17 In Gao Xingjian’s paintings, there are titles that indicate psychical moments of the self, which in Chan Buddhist terms signify elements of “chaos” in the mindscape. This is already demonstrated in many of the titles of paintings from his first major solo exhibition, held in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 1995 such as the following:18 1. 幽居 L’Isolement 2. 極地 L’Extrémité du monde 3. 他鄉 Pays lointain 4. 忘 L’Oubli 5. 渡 La Traversée 6. 無想 Sans pensée 7. 夢境 Lieu du rêve 8. 觀 L’Observation 9. 冬日 L’Hiver 10. 底層 Au fond 11. 惑 La Confusion 12. 慾之門 La Porte du désir 13. 歸途 Retour 14. 夢 Rêve 15. 玄想 Mythe 16. 鄉愁 Nostalgie 17. 昇華 L’Ascension 18. 觀想 Méditation

152

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

19. 雪夜 Nuit de neige 20. 奇思 Vol de l’esprit 21. 內觀 Une vision intérieure 22. 寂靜 La Sérénité 23. 倒影 Le Reflet 24. 驚奇 L’Émerveillement 25. 童話 Un conte de fées 26. 山石 Existence immobile 27. 瞬間 Un clin d’oeil Some titles seem to depict external scenes—such as L’Extrémité du monde, Pays lointain, L’Hiver, Le Reflet, Retour, Nuit de neige, and Existence immobile—but they are actually landscapes depicting states of the inner mind. Titles like Au fond, La Confusion, La Porte du désir, Rêve, L’Ascension, and L’Émerveillement carry deep meanings that refer to psychical moments of the self. Other titles—such as L’Oubli, Sans pensée, Lieu du rêve, L’Observation, Mythe, Méditation, Vol de l’esprit, Une vision intérieure, La Sérénité, and Un clin d’oeil—are Chan Buddhist concepts of self-transcendence. The titles of these paintings show three visions of the self: the troubled mindscape, the psychical moment, and the self in Chan Buddhist transcendence. What is the self in Gao Xingjian’s world of art? In Chan Buddhist terms, the self is a lonely being seeking inspiration of the mind, which can only be realized when it transcends itself. In the exhibition The Solitary World of Gao Xingjian the paintings surround the theme of loneliness and quest, which can be compared to the solitary figure in Gao Xingjian’s paintings L’Observateur (figure 8) and Waiting (figure 9). The figure in both paintings is faced with a vast unknown, an existentialist predicament of modern life.

The Mind’s Eye

153

Figure 8. Gao Xingjian, L’Observateur, 2016.

Source. Reprinted by permission of Gao Xingjian.

In many of Gao Xingjian’s paintings, there are light sources that could signify windows, possibly windows of the mind. He has expressed this view: “In a painting a small cosmos is established that goes past the frame of the painting; the frame merely provides a window. Even if the painter sees the external world through the window, it is at the same time a projection of his inner mind. Moreover, from this window one can see a world that is totally of the inner mind.”19

154

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Figure 9. Gao Xingjian, Waiting, 2004.

Source. Reprinted by permission of Gao Xingjian.

Light sources that could be construed as windows open unfathomable depths of the inner mind. While painting can be an exercise in Chan Buddhist inspiration, Gao Xingjian sees it also as a source of selffulfillment: I always listen to music while painting, waiting for the music to strike a chord in my heart before setting out. Once moved, images flow from me, and with the movement of the brush and ink, the music gives my painting a certain kind of rhythm. Music gives the respective components of painting (points, fields, and lines, or brush strokes) even more feeling, so why not use it? This method of creating shapes and images allows the various colors of mood, giving a painting a living presence.20 Here Gao Xingjian tells us his secret in painting: mood. This mood is an inner urge, a visualization of the mind.

The Mind’s Eye

155

Beside sources of light, rivers, roads, solid darkness, and black holes signifying chaos (in the form of masses of swerving fluids), there are other images in Gao Xingjian’s paintings, such as vast hollowness, human figures, and trees. Together they form a vivid Beckettian stage of waiting in the middle of emptiness, facing a leafless tree or on a road leading nowhere. For Gao Xingjian, If the self-expression of an artist becomes the direct expression of self, then one’s art will be a mess. As the self (or ego) is a chaotic mass, or a black hole to begin with, unless an artist exercises selfknowledge and removes himself for dispassionate observation of the world (including the self), then what is there to see? … More than self-expression I see art as a case of self-purification— observing with a pair of somewhat sober eyes the ever-changing world and one’s own mainly unconnected self. And although he may not understand the riddles of life, the artist can leave behind a surprise or two.21

156

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Figure 10. Gao Xingjian’s photograph.

Source: Gao Xingjian, The Case for Literature, trans. Mabel Lee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), book jacket. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.

The Mind’s Eye

157

The Mind’s Eye In several paintings, Gao Xingjian explicitly deals with subjects that concern viewing and visioning. A photograph (figure 10) used as the cover for his book The Case for Literature shows him covering his right eye with his right hand and could have different layers of meaning: (1) Gao Xingjian shows himself seeing with one eye. Gao Xingjian is consistent in his perspective when seeing with one eye. (2) One side of Gao Xingjian’s face is seen, the other hidden. There is a theory in psychology that the two sides of a person’s face reveal two different personalities. Gao Xingjian shows that he has two personalities: one known, and the other unknown. (3) The photograph shows Gao Xingjian’s interest in his self-image. In physiognomy, Chinese or Western, it is believed that a person’s face and hand(s) can tell his fate. As Gao Xingjian believes in fate, he must be interested in how he looks in a photograph showing half of his face and one of his hands. All three layers of meaning are possible in this self-portrait of Gao Xingjian. When this is compared with his earlier painting Portrait (figure 9), which also shows half of a person’s face with an ear covered, it can be ascertained that Gao attempts to go beyond facial delineation to psychological depiction in face portraits. For him, “perspective” means much more than a technique for the external depiction of objects. Gao’s Portrait (figure 11) is reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s SelfPortrait (figure 12) in which one ear is covered by a bandage. Unlike van Gogh’s Self-Portrait, Gao Xingjian’s Portrait shows only half of the face, with a fixed stare. Because it is an ink painting with light shades, it looks watery and smudged, giving a sense of instability that reflects the state of mind of the person portrayed.

158

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Figure 11. Gao Xingjian, Portrait, 1995.

Source. Reprinted by permission of Gao Xingjian.

The Mind’s Eye Figure 12. Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait Bandaged, 1889.

Source: http://www.vangoghgallery.com/in_his_steps/images/selfportrait-bandaged.jpg

159

160

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Figure 13. Gao Xingjian, Regard intérieur, 1995.

Source. Reprinted by permission of Gao Xingjian.

Gao Xingjian’s interest in the eye as a window to the soul can be seen in the painting Regard intérieur (The interior look; figure 13), in which half of a man’s face is shown behind the naked body of a woman. This painting probes male sexuality. Plato’s Symposium tells us that hidden in a man’s soul is the female half of his self.

The Mind’s Eye

161

Sexuality as rediscovery of human nature and human experience was a theme that inspired the works of many writers after the Cultural Revolution in China.22 In Gao Xingjian’s novels Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible, sex and woman are depicted as love objects in the male psyche, as well as different positions in the dialogic self.23 Figure 14. Gao Xingjian, Inner Eye, 2015.

Source. Reprinted by permission of Gao Xingjian.

Gao Xingjian’s Inner Eye (figure 14) shows a cavelike eye in which the pupil reflects shadows of a human figure, and the single staring eye

162

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

penetrates and taps into the inner eye of the human mind. Gao’s Inner Eye bears the same title as Satyajit Ray’s 1974 documentary on the noted Indian painter Binode Bihari Mukherjee, who lost his sight following an unsuccessful cataract operation. The documentary explores Mukherjee’s inner eye that guides his fingers to create art despite his loss of sight. Gao’s Inner Eye sums up his belief that artistic creativity relies on the painter’s inner eye. While sometimes Gao Xingjian’s paintings portray the eye as a window to the soul, at other times he uses the eye to deal with broader subjects, such as the universe and mysticism. L’Oeil de la nuit (The eye of the night; figure 15) is just such an attempt to depict the mysterious aspects of life, which Gao Xingjian calls “Fate” in his novels Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible. The Eye of the Night is also the name of a Tarot card that is all-seeing and all-knowing, and shows the nine stars, the ocean, the land, the sky, the world, the stars, and the vastness of space representing the universe. The Eye of the Night has everything combined into one, a vision that gives a person the power of God. Here Gao’s L’Oeil de la nuit is symbolic of the power in a person’s eye that can cast shadows and shape the night.

The Mind’s Eye Figure 15. Gao Xingjian, L’Oeil de la nuit, 1994.

Source. Reprinted by permission of Gao Xingjian.

163

164

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Figure 16. Gao Xingjian, The Celestial Eye, 2011.

Source. Reprinted by permission of Gao Xingjian.

In The Celestial Eye (figure 16), Gao Xingjian experiments with an eye overseeing chaos. The eye hangs out in the sky and, unlike the human eye, it is like a telescope in the shape of a feeler that is searching and questing. Heaven has an eye, but it is unlike the human eye that sees only things in the human world. The celestial eye sees things from above: it is a watchful and all-seeing eye.

The Mind’s Eye

165

Read alongside Gao Xingjian’s theoretical treatises and his literary works, the depiction of eyes in his paintings shows rich meanings pertaining to hidden aspects of the human psyche, sexuality, the painter’s perspective, and philosophical inquiry. The inner eye, the eye of the night, and the celestial eye are all the painter’s eye. Mabel Lee describes Gao Xingjian’s creative aesthetics as being scrutinized by “the third eye,”24 by which he provides a metaperspective over his characters and the inner workings of their minds. The eyes in Gao Xingjian’s paintings are perspectival eyes, extending the painter’s perception to philosophical inquiries into the realms of the metaphysical and the psychic.

166

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Notes 1. Gao Xingjian, “My Thoughts on Painting,” in Gao, Without Isms (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 1996), 292. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. In Kwok-kan Tam, “Gao Xingjian, the Nobel Prize and the Politics of Recognition,” in Tam, Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2001), 12, I argue that Gao Xingjian’s idea of contemplation is derived from the Chan Buddhist practice aimed at transcending the self, hence providing a different subject position in perception. 6. Kwok-kan Tam, “Language as Subjectivity in One Man’s Bible,” in Tam, Soul of Chaos, 301. Gao maintains that during a painting the painter must “act as a participant in the creative process.” 7. Gao, “My Thoughts on Painting,” 294. 8. The exhibition at the University of Maryland Art Gallery (November 6– December 20, 2013) also resulted in a book-length study: Jason C. Kuo, The Inner Landscape: The Paintings of Gao Xingjian (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2013). “The Inner Visions of Gao Xingjian” was aired on Brussels radio station Bruzz in 2015. 9. See for example Daniel Bergez, Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul, trans. Sherry Buchanan (London: Asia Ink, 2013). 10. The “solitary world” is a description of Gao Xingjian’s paintings in an exhibition held in Hong Kong during 2001. 11. Quoted from Edmund Lee, “Interview: Gao Xingjian,” TimeOut, April 28, 2010: http://timeout-admin-node1.candrholdings.com/art/features/3 3942/interview-gao-xingjian.html. 12. Lee, “Interview.” 13. Jason Kuo argues that the themes of Gao’s paintings are inseparable from his sense of being an exile, and can be traced back to autobiographical elements in his novels Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible: Jason Kuo, “The Paintings of Gao Xingjian,” in his The Inner Landscape, 1–24. 14. See Bergez, Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul. 15. In a 2009 lecture on Gao Xingjian’s painting presented at National Chung Hsing University’s Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature and Transna-

The Mind’s Eye

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

167

tional Cultural Studies, I proposed reading Gao’s paintings in relation to his literary work. Estelle Spoto, “The Inner Visions of Gao Xingjian,” Bruzz, February 25, 2015: http://www.bruzz.be/en/expo/inner-visions-gao-xingjian. Gao Xingjian, “Concerning Silhouette/Shadow,” trans. Mabel Lee, in Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian, ed. Fiona Sze-Lorrain (Paris: Contours, 2007), 23. These paintings are collected in Chang Chen-yu, Ink Paintings by Gao Xingjian (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1995). Gao, “Another Kind of Aesthetics,” in Gao Xingjian, Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), 127. Gao Xingjian, “My Thoughts on Painting,” quoted in Chang Chen-yu, Ink Paintings by Gao Xingjian (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1995), 25. Ibid. For example, Zhang Xianliang’s Half of Man Is Woman, trans. Martha Avery (New York: Norton, 1988), depicts the incomplete male self as the result of political castration during the Cultural Revolution. See Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain, trans. Mabel Lee (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), and One Man’s Bible, trans. Mabel Lee (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). Mabel Lee, “Gao Xingjian: Autobiography and the Portrayal of the Female Psyche,” in Gao Xingjian, City of the Dead and Song of the Night, trans. Gilbert C. Fong and Mabel Lee (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2015), xi.

Chapter 11

Chan Buddhist Scenography and Gao Xingjian’s Opera Snow in August Jiang Hanyang

Inspired by Chan Buddhism—commonly known in the West as Zen —xieyi theater became one of the most significant, yet highly contentious aesthetic categories of the performing arts in modern China. The term xieyi literally means “to sketch meaning,” and its genesis can be traced back to the literati art that emerged after the Song dynasty (960–1279). With its qualities of spontaneity, naturalness, and minimalism, xieyi was popular as an art aesthetic for Chinese artists and critics alike in the ensuing eras. In modern times, the eminent Western art historian James Cahill blamed the decline in later Chinese painting on xieyi, because it became an alibi for paucity of skill in style and technique. However, the renowned early Qing scholar Zheng Xie (1693–1766) held

170

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

the opposite view: “You have to attain skill first, and then you can do hsieh-i [xieyi].”1 For Zheng Xie, xieyi does not connote dilettantism, but instead is probably a mental perspective decoupled from the obsession with skills and knowledge, which, ironically, are the prerequisites for acquiring that perspective. Zheng Xie’s words seem familiar because, during the rehearsal of his play Snow in August,2 Gao Xingjian asked performers to abandon their Peking Opera conventions on stage while at the same time embodying their Peking Opera background.3 For Gao, the best status for a player when striking a pose before spectators was a “state of Chan [Zen],” referring to “living in the present,” an intuitive view of life that is free of dualistic thought and logic.4 Nonetheless, he did not ignore the issue of performance technique. To fully acknowledge the artificial nature of theater, he called for an omnipotent theater and a concomitant type of omnipotent actor who possesses all performance methods, including choreography, acrobatics, and shamanic chanting.5 This attitude of “denial of cultural anchoring,”6 to borrow the words of Patrice Pavis, is inextricably tied to the mythic quest for the lost musical-iconic languages of theater, testifying to the antiquarian yet innovative facet of xieyi. In the realm of theater xieyi is regarded as the antithesis of xieshi, the acting orthodoxy of socialist realism. The playwright, director, and theorist Yu Shangyuan (1897–1970) was a driving force in the National Theatre Movement of the mid-1920s, and he planted the seed of the later controversy over xieyi by translating it as “presentational.” As Siyuan Liu puts it, “presentational” initially bears the imprint of modernist presentational performance and betrays Yu’s “exposure to the modernist breakdown of the fourth wall.”7 Therefore, xieyi can be cross-referenced to anti-illusionism created by stylized acting and suggestive settings. In the post Cultural Revolution era, perhaps none could surpass Huang Zuolin (1906–1994), the veteran stage director of Shanghai People’s Art Theatre, in defining xieyi in terms of theoretical engagement or theatrical practice. Immersed in the dramaturgy of Jacques Copeau and Michel Saint-Denis, Huang developed his own aesthetic by bridging the premises of Brecht

Chan Buddhist Scenography

171

and Stanislavski with the tenets of theatricality in classical Chinese drama. He had a unique vision of theater and claimed it did not function merely as an art of optical illusion, but was also a vehicle of poetic rendition. Huang enriched the stage in terms of visual techniques and aesthetic appeal, and he notes that xieyi is the “essence” of Chinese art. He maps out four salient outer characteristics of traditional Chinese theater: fluidity, plasticity, sculpturality, and conventionality; and four inner characteristics: the depiction of sublimated life, eurythmicized bodily movements, lyrical rather than plain language, and a symbolic décor.8 Huang’s treatise on xieyi had a profound impact on the theater debate of the 1980s, which provided Gao Xingjian with the backdrop for conducting his theatrical experimentation. More importantly, Gao Xingjian’s coinage of suppositionality (jiading xing) and theatricism (juchang xing) reinterpreted the seemingly vague and ineffable xieyi in “modern dramaturgic idioms.”9 In this regard, xieyi denotes an interdependent relationship between actor and audience, the latter playing a participatory rather than passive role to engage in the performance onstage, “a sphere beyond the routinized,”10 with the aid of scenic and kinetic elements including scenic synecdoche, flexibility of space, and expressive body movements in response to improvised music. This brings us to refocus on the scenography of xieyi. My take on scenography carries on a dialogue with the visual–spatial turn in theater studies, especially the recent critical engagement with nontraditional theatrical space. The word “scenography,” according to Arnold Aronson, “implies something more than creating scenery or costumes or lights” and “carries a connotation of an all-encompassing visual–spatial construct as well as the process of change and transformation that is an inherent part of the physical vocabulary of the stage.”11 I suggest that the visual– spatial construct of xieyi is rooted in the Chinese view of art, which emphasizes the combination of emptiness (xu) and solidity (shi) together with the lyrical movement of dance (wu). By the Chinese view of art, I refer to the observations of Zong Baihua (1897–1986) on the spacing in Chinese artistic representation based on the painting text known as Hua

172

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

quan, by Dan Chongguang (1623–1692): “If the positions of the various elements [in a picture] are mutually conflicting, many of the painted portions become piled up like tumors, but when the empty and the solid parts stand in proper mutual relation, those which are not painted also contribute to the wonderful effect of the whole thing.”12 Besides, xieyi, as the manifestation of artistic perspective, goes beyond the limits of time and space, it generates endless sensations and feelings. In what follows, I locate the discussion of the scenic xieyi in Gao Xingjian’s Buddhist-inflected play Snow in August, which some scholars interpret as the playwright’s autobiography, “an allegorization of Gao’s own act of fleeing.”13 One can argue that insofar as Huineng, the sixth patriarch of Chan Buddhism and the lead character in Snow in August, is portrayed as the incarnation of surpassing the world’s surface or “sensory reality,” it is possible to establish a connection between such a philosophy of transcendence and the scenic xieyi that indicates an “imaginary reality,” a reality beyond the verisimilar effect of illusionistic theater.14 Act I, scene 3, titled “In Which Huineng Runs Away from Disaster,” depicts Huineng chased by both the crowd and Huiming, the former general who is now an unappreciated disciple of the Old Patriarch Hongren. Yeh Fu-run,15 playing the role of Hongren, hobbles across the stage with the robe, while Huang Fa-kuo, playing the role of Huiming, mounts the stage; at the same time, the painted backdrop, that is an enlarged replica of Gao Xingjian’s ink-wash painting Devant et derrière la porte uncannily fades and gradually becomes reminiscent of scenery by a river. This process is mediated by digital technology, which, in Aronson’s terms, ruptures time and space and initiates the process of “dematerialization of the stage.” The disappearance of Yeh Fu-run and the appearance of Huang Fa-kuo can be interpreted thus: “performers seem to emerge from projections or disappear into ethereal images.”16 In this creation, it is difficult for spectators to distinguish the real from the projected or, to put it another way, to distinguish the solid from the empty. Instead, they have been plunged into the world of Gao

Chan Buddhist Scenography

173

Xingjian’s expressive, minimalistic imagery that revolves around the “possibilities afforded by black ink on a white background” and is made up of “imperceptible stitching and frayed edges of blurry ink-washes.”17 The stage entry of Huang Fa-kuo is accompanied by frightening orchestral music. As a martial-arts male lead whose typical roles require acrobatics and stage fighting, Huang is well versed in swift and vigorous movement. Holding high his wooden staff and raising a foot to a shoulder, he strikes a pose before striding to the front of the stage. Seconds later, the crowd summoned by Huang’s actions advances silently to where he is holding his staff as if it is an oar and has started paddling. This corresponding series of mimes are executed in a meticulous yet suggestive manner. After Huang strikes a pose and steps gingerly downstage, the crowd begins to walk in rhythm with a purposeful hip slouch, reaching the exit of the stage and returning to move toward the entrance again. By then, the painted backdrop has inexplicably metamorphosed into a horizontally suspended oval shape that is difficult to identify but is a recurring motif in Gao Xingjian’s pictorial syntax, as can be seen in The World of Silence (1999), Omnipresence (1999), Dazzle (1998), and The Eternal (1998).18 For those familiar with Gao’s literary oeuvre, the dread of the evil eye or the fear of the Other’s gaze is a common leitmotif in his works. In this respect, I take this oval shape as the visual representation of the sun, a symbol often associated with mass surveillance. Simply put, the totality of the visual, auditory, and musical signs brings out the psychological turmoil under the bodily composure, suggesting that Huineng—the one whom Huiming and the crowd are chasing—is in danger. At the same time, Wu Hsing-kuo, who acts the part of Huineng, enters. In his notes on the music of Snow in August, the Chinese–French composer Xu Shuya stresses that “In Peking opera, the story is often narrated through songs as well as rhymed or nonrhymed monologues, whereas in Western opera, narration is done by means of aria and parlando. I think the monologues in Peking Opera are equally as beautiful as parlando, and more rousing.”19 To redesign the soundscape, Xu blended

174

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

two operatic traditions to “resist the ‘pastiche strategy’ employed by many Chinese composers that senselessly combines jingju-style music with Western music.”20 Xu Shuya’s eclectic effort coincides with Wu Hsing-kuo’s intercultural aesthetic agenda, which benefits the latter in smoothing over the discrepancy between Peking opera and Western opera. As Alexander C.Y. Huang points out, Wu and the experiments his Contemporary Legend Theatre conducted not only blur the boundary between music drama (xiqu) and spoken drama (huaju) but also formulate a third approach to reviving jingju “by infusing new performance idioms and preserving the ‘authentic’ jingju tradition.”21 As seen and heard in this scene, Wu Hsing-kuo has a cloth knapsack on his back and his lines—halfsung, half-recited—are accompanied by Western and Chinese percussion: (Sings.) The water flows and flows, A strong wind drives the waves, (Recites.) Set adrift is a lonely boat, The Yangtze River it braves. Even Buddha finds the world A trying place to reside. The Dharma is mine to keep, (Sings.) I still have to run and hide.22 The final tone of “run and hide” sung by Wu Hsing-kuo, bright and forceful as it is, shifts between melodic passages and rises to a high pitch that can be perceived as modulation (zhuandiao or “shifting key”).23 The crowd in front sways with an irregular rhythm, at a pace in response to the tempo of Wu Hsing-kuo’s aria. In this way, the visceral presence of the crowd is not so much miming fluctuating waves as a conduit through which the ebb and flow of Huineng’s psyche becomes visible. Wu then exits and Huang Fa-kuo struts forward in the normal way, chanting, “Look! There’s the boat! The lowly stinking little brat, that’s

Chan Buddhist Scenography

175

the guy! Don’t let him get away, go catch him at once!”24 As if obeying the order, the crowd leaps into action and soon runs out of sight. The whole process ends up becoming testimony to the tension between action and meaning. Eugenio Barba contends that action itself does not have its own meaning. Rather, meaning is the fruit of convention, the performer–spectator relationship, so to speak. For Barba, “the preexpressive level” as a pragmatic category “develops and organizes the performer’s scenic bios and generates new relationships and unexpected possibilities for meaning.”25 Hence we have experienced a most intriguing moment of the scenic xieyi: the pre-expressivity of the crowd by no means germinates specific meanings in the audience’s mind yet invites contingent interpretations of the dynamics on the stage. To some extent, the scenic xieyi accords with the rationale underlying the pictorial genre named after xieyi: “to renounce the plenitude of physical appearance in search of the elusive conceptual overtones beyond representation.”26 As the stage directions put it, the crowd is running as they sing. However, in the actual performance, as soon as the crowd mentioned above leaves, another group of performers from the National Experimental Chorus gathers and turns to look out at the audience, singing the following lines peacefully: Make haste, make haste, Don’t let him land before! Cross every river, Climb every mountain. It’s all the same, The human world or the western sky, It’s hard being a man, Even harder a Buddha, if you try. Cross every river, Climb every mountain.Great Wisdom, on the other shore, Only fools give chase and dash out the door, It’s only futile, Futile ...27

176

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Compared with the author’s text, the theatrical text combines Huineng’s lines with the crowd’s, and the physical and aural presence of the crowd fosters the muted passions that are a materialization of Huineng’s mind. Accordingly, the painted backcloth changes into a moonlike figure, implying that night has fallen. Although he is walking in front of the chorus, light and shadow, Wu Hsing-kuo completely merges with the nocturnal atmosphere intended for him. To borrow Adolphe Appia’s words, the stage design no longer attempts to give the illusion of a night scene by the riverside but instead the illusion of a man deep in thought.28 What is more, as opposed to the tranquil chorus, Wu Hsing-kuo recites the lines as a rhyming and sonorous Peking opera monologue: Mount Dayi is bare and drear, The wind howling, The spring water cold and clear. Huineng, where can you rest your life? The Dharma is with dangers rife.29 If the change from one state to another and the contrast between two different factors are Gao Xingjian’s entry points to reacquaint himself with theatricality,30 then the rhythmic interplay of the dynamic (dong) and the static (jing), as demonstrated earlier, in the scenography of Snow in August actualizes his ideal. Scene 3 culminates with Huineng smashing the alms bowl symbolizing his leadership status within the Chan School when Huiming threatens him: “Give me your life, or the robe and alms bowl!”31 To conclude, by letting go of the alms bowl, is Huineng suggesting that it is extraneous to the self and that, to obtain the Dharma, one needs to highlight one’s detachment from the fetish desire for material objects? In other words, can Huineng or Gao Xingjian be toying with a polemical and “self-denial” notion of xieyi, like that proposed by Zheng Xie at the beginning of the present chapter: that one must first hone one’s skill to go beyond the limitations of representation before one can attain the artistic perspective epitomized by xieyi?

Chan Buddhist Scenography

177

Notes 1. James Cahill, “Afterword: Hsieh-i as a Cause of Decline in Later Chinese Painting,” in Three Alternative Histories of Chinese Painting (Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1988), 109. 2. Gao Xingjian, Snow in August (Taipei: Lianjing, 2000). 3. Chou Mei-huei [Zhou Meihui], Snowy Ground and Chan Thoughts: On Site Notes from Snow in August Directed by Gao Xingjian (Taipei: Lianjing, 2002), 21. 4. Chou, Snowy Ground, 91. 5. Gao Xingjian, “The Potential of Theatre,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), 45. 6. Patrice Pavis, “Introduction: Towards a Theory of Interculturalism in Theatre?” in The Intercultural Performance Reader, ed. Patrice Pavis (London: Routledge, 1996), 10. 7. Siyuan Liu, “The Cross Currents of Modern Theatre and China’s National Theatre Movement of 1925–1926,” Asian Theatre Journal 33, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 11. 8. Huang Zuolin, “Mei Lanfang, Stanislavsky and Brecht—A Study in Contrasts,” in Peking Opera and Mei Lanfang: A Guide to China’s Traditional Theatre and the Arts of Its Great Master, ed. Wu Zuguang, Huang Zuolin, and Mei Shaowu (Beijing: New World Press, 1981), 14–29. 9. Henry Y.H. Zhao, Towards A Modern Zen Theatre: Gao Xingjian and Chinese Theatre Experimentalism (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 2000), 62. 10. Haiping Yan, “Theatricality in Classical Chinese Drama,” in Theatricality, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 84. 11. Arnold Aronson, “Introduction,” in Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 7. 12. Zong Baihua, “Emptiness and Solidity in Chinese Artistic Representation,” in Strolling in Aesthetics (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1981), 76, 77. The translation refers to Osvald Sirén, Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles, Vol. V. The Late Ming and Leading Ch’ing Masters (New York: Ronald Press, 1956), 125. 13. Alexander C.Y. Huang, “The Theatricality of Religious Rhetoric: Gao Xingjian and the Meaning of Exile,” Theatre Journal 63, no. 3 (October

178

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

2011): 376; Liu Zaifu, “Snow in August: An Inscription Describing Gao Xingjian’s Character,” in Liu, On Gao Xingjian (Taipei: Lianjing, 2004), 16. My close reading of the scenography of Snow in August is based on the video recording of the theatrical production directed by Gao Xingjian and Tsao Fu-yung (Taipei: Council for Cultural Affairs, 2002) DVD. For more on “imaginary reality,” see Li Zehou, The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition, trans. Maija Bell Samei (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), 141–159. For details of the cast, see Gao Xingjian, Snow in August: A Play in Three Acts and Eight Scenes (Taipei: Council for Cultural Affairs, 2002), 9. Arnold Aronson, “The Dematerialization of the Stage,” in The Disappearing Stage: Reflections on the 2011 Prague Quadrennial, ed. Arnold Aronson (Prague: Arts and Theatre Institute: Prague Quadrennial, 2012), 90. Daniel Bergez, Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul (London: Asia Ink, 2013), 26. Bergez, Gao Xingjian, 103, 109, 115, 118. Xu Shuya, “August Snow: Note on Its Music,” in Gao, Snow in August: A Play in Three Acts and Eight Scenes, 58. Huang, “The Theatricality of Religious Rhetoric,” 372. Alexander C.Y. Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 219. Gao Xingjian, Snow in August, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2003), 25. The adjustment of line sequences is based on the video recording. Elizabeth Wichmann, Listening to Theatre: The Aural Dimension of Beijing Opera (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 84. Gao, Snow in August, 25. Eugenio Barba, The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, trans. Richard Fowler (London: Routledge, 1996), 108. Eugene Y. Wang, “The Winking Owl: Visual Effect and Its Art Historical Thick Description,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 450. Gao, Snow in August, 25, 26. Adolphe Appia, “Ideas on a Reform of Our Mise-en-scène,” in Adolphe Appia: Texts on Theatre, ed. Richard C. Beacham (London: Routledge, 1993), 63. Gao, Snow in August, 26, 27. Gao, “The Potential of Theatre,” 44. Gao, Snow in August, 27.

Part III

Cine-Poems with Paintings, Dance, and Music

Chapter 12

Floods and Forests Gao Xingjian’s Transcultural Aesthetic of Catastrophe Megan Evans After experiencing natural or human-made catastrophe, an awareness of life is reawakened in people, and it is precisely the spiritual, the poetic, and the beautiful that symbolize hope.1 Gao Xingjian suggests that when faced with “almighty, unstoppable natural disasters,” humankind previously sought explanation in the Bible. He observes that in modern society we are confronted to an even greater extent with catastrophes of our own making, whether ecological or military/political, and that art is humankind’s primary coping mechanism: “In modern times when religion diminishes by the day, people can seek comfort only in art.”2 Gao defends art that is “spiritual, poetic and beautiful” rather than functional, arguing for and practicing artistic expression that is independent and autonomous, “subservient to neither politics nor market consumerism.”3 Bruce McConachie builds on work in embodied cognition and aesthetic experience as well as helping bridge the divide between film and theater critical discourse, arguing that “By rear-

182

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

ranging the materiality of our minds, performances in all media can exert performative pressure on our conceptions of social roles, governmental policies, and ecological realities.”4 Film and theater with their emphasis on human beings moving in environments are particularly well situated to help audiences work through humankind’s complex interrelationships to and within the more-than-human world on which we depend for our survival. As Adrian Ivakhiv suggests, these interrelationships can be considered “more deeply and with more emotional engagement” because a spectator encounters a moving image composition (or a theater production) through the continually renegotiated balance of focus on setting versus action that is constructed as these time-based media unfold.5 Thus, even artistic works that are not “about” ecological problems can motivate ethical working through and encourage meaningful action on such problems. This essay, however, investigates two of Gao Xingjian’s most ecologically themed works: his 1985 play Wild Man,6 the last of his plays staged in China, and After the Flood,7 the second of his films, created in 2008 in France, where he has lived and worked since 1987. Reading between the two works, I show how aesthetic strategies developed in the earlier play are carried forward in the later film, and how both offer rich opportunities for deep and engaged eco-ethical “working through.” Wild Man interweaves several narrative threads, including Ecologist’s trip to a mountainous area where rampant deforestation is under way and rumors of a yetilike Wild Man have excited local villagers and ignited a media frenzy. It was written immediately after Gao’s five-month epic journey through remote southwest China that provided much of the material for his great novel Soul Mountain. Gao’s “cinematic poem” After the Flood films human performers moving in front of digitized projections of his paintings. The paintings portray vast treeless landscapes, evoking the aftermath of some great catastrophe, as suggested by the film’s title. Aesthetic strategies deployed in Wild Man, including suppositional representation and polyphonic composition, contributed to open and contingent dramaturgical structures that engaged in “ecological reciprocity and community” rather than “ineradicably other[ing]”

Floods and Forests

183

nature, what Theresa May has termed “eco-dramaturgy.”8 In the mixed media cine-poem After the Flood, Gao used related strategies that ignite eco-ethical considerations for the viewer and open space for productive consideration of the film on eco-critical terms. Both works communicate easily across cultural contexts. Where Wild Man incorporates many specifically Chinese elements,9 its robustly “open” eco-dramaturgy supported a culturally accessible staging of the play that I directed in 2014 in Aotearoa, New Zealand,10 a country that, despite its clean, green media reputation, shares with China a modern history of polluted waterways and radical deforestation. Providing the setting for After the Flood, Gao’s suggestive paintings employ Chinese ink but through innovative techniques so that they evoke an every/no-placeness, becoming an archetypal signifier for “Earth.” Conveying a similarly archetypal every/no-culture, the mixed-race cast of six performers are draped in monochrome cloth, echoing the suggestive silhouettes of Gao’s painted figures, and move with abstracted gestures. The synthesized soundscape, composed by Thierry Bertomeu, scrapes and surges in autonomous counterpoint to the images, neither imitating sounds of the natural world nor offering recognizable melodies.11

Wilderness and Suppositionality Gao has long asserted the liberating function of a theatrical as opposed to a realistic approach to staging in his dramatic work. He draws inspiration from the open, “suppositional” staging of xiqu (Chinese opera), in which, for example, a xiqu actor manipulating a prop oar with highly stylized movements on an empty stage engages the audience’s imagination to construct a thrilling journey down a wildly rushing river. Gao writes: “Once the theater has been reconfirmed as a space in which actors perform before an audience, and the stage as a hypothetical environment, everything becomes possible in theatrical expression.”12 Yan Haiping asserts that xiqu staging techniques work by “pointing at what there is to know,”13 and that this process activates audience agency in co-creation

184

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

of the theatrical event. She argues that this co-creative agency proceeds through both aesthetic and, more importantly for this discussion, ethical terms in that “energies [are] knowingly gestured, gathered, felt, imagined, and inhabited by both performers and audiences.”14 Aligning easily with McConachie’s concept of “performative pressure,” Yan asserts that this suppositional process “activates a site for audiences to pause, think, reflect, feel, create, and act upon their own positionings in the battlefield of the real, the truthful, and the ethical.”15 In both Wild Man and After the Flood, Gao’s suppositional aesthetic resists any attempt to tame the experience of “real wilderness” for ready human consumption, the way the “gorgeously shot nature porn” of filmmaker Ken Burns does.16 In Wild Man, wilderness is not staged directly; instead, ideas about it are conveyed from multiple and reciprocal perspectives: as a resource to exploit, as endangered habitat, as a place to play, as a topic of scientific research, as an obstacle to be overcome by the “Wild Man Investigation Team.” At times we experience a wilderness under siege; elsewhere the threat points in the other direction, with human society and economic well-being endangered by rapidly flooding rivers and slowly growing trees. Suppositional staging techniques allow the action to move readily from city to remote forest, from the present to the prehistoric past. As Gao advises: “Because the action spans thousands of years, it is not possible or necessary to have a realistic set. The division of scenes relies on lighting and sound effects, on the imagination of the audience, and most importantly on the acting, which sometimes needs to be realistic.”17 From moment to moment, both stage and actors present themselves to the audience as open to new interpretations. As an example, Gao constructs a scene of stylized large-group physical movement in which tree poachers are confronted by a forest security guard.18 This is followed by a realistically scripted scene in which the wife of Ecologist asks him for a divorce. In our New Zealand production of the play, actors in the forest scene had transformed from trees into tree poachers into felled trees. Their bodies strewn across the stage depicted a carnage of deforestation that echoed an early twentieth-century photograph projected on the

Floods and Forests

185

upstage wall of a New Zealand waterway choked to the horizon with giant felled kauri trees. The image then dissolved into a projection of one of Gao’s paintings depicting a lone figure in a barren landscape. Simultaneously, Ecologist stepped among the actor bodies, adopting the posture of the figure in the image as he began the dialogue with his wife. The “hypothetical environment” of Gao’s dramaturgy allows this construction of metaphors in service to eco-ethical “reciprocity and community”: trees are corpses, a dying marriage is a desolate landscape. The evocative landscapes of Gao’s experimental ink paintings, particularly those chosen for inclusion in After the Flood, also “point at” what there might be to know about wilderness rather than attempt to capture its “real” appearance. Gao says his paintings occupy a stylistic territory between abstract and realistic as “the means through which ample space for the imagination is provided to both artist and viewers.”19 Brought to center focus in Gao’s film, wilderness is conveyed through his suggestive paintings, activating viewer imagination in the co-creation of the film’s eco-ethical stance. Ivakhiv observes a continuum of cinematic portrayal of the natural world that runs from setting to landscape, or “setting-asmargin” to “setting-as-focal.” At the setting end, the world of the film is presented to the viewer as background or margin while focus is given to the (usually) human-centered narrative action. When a cinematic segment focuses more strongly on the environment, it shifts toward the landscape or “setting-as-focal” end of the spectrum. It achieves this effect by holding the “contemplative gaze” of the camera/viewer and interrupting any forward narrative progression. The slow pace of Gao’s film positions the viewer firmly within such a contemplative stance. As Ivakhiv notes, “extreme long shots, slow pans, and long takes all make it possible for us to stop and think,” to stop and experience, to work through the eco-ethical balance of the world(s) playing out before us.20 Further supporting a contemplative viewer experience is the fact that Gao’s painterly wilderness extends inward as well as outward.21 Discussing the paintings chosen for After the Flood, Gao notes that fewer than a third “directly manifest disaster; the others have their own individual

186

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

themes, either the vast cosmos with its undefined space or isolated men and women who manifest certain mental images … visions of the inner mind that are often evoked when one loses oneself in deep thought.”22 While painting titles “point” a viewer toward contemplation of inner versus outer landscapes, Gao says he gives them merely as suggestions.23 The viewer of this film, however, is not given access to the titles of individual paintings, even in the credits. Instead, she or he is directed by the title After the Flood to view the work as a whole within a frame of ecological catastrophe. In Ivakhiv’s model, the horizontal spectrum of setting to landscape is intersected by a vertical axis demarking focus on action; the more intensely a filmic segment focuses on action, the less attention is available for focus on the environment in which the action is taking place.24 In After the Flood, the performer’s abstract movements resist concrete narrative progression; their “action” consists of viewing or otherwise physically responding to the paintings. For example, the opening segment is limited to a performer’s extended, contemplative looking at Gao’s 2006 painting The Auspices.25 Unlike the minimalist, often androgynous silhouettes that compose Gao’s painted human figures, the human performers in After the Flood are made of fleshier stuff. They cannot suggest or point at what there is to know about a human being the way Gao’s painted figures do. Nonetheless, draped in dark or white cloth, avoiding simulation of everyday movements, given no language to speak, and moving in front of Gao’s suggestive paintings, they maintain an equivalent poetic ambivalence devoid of dramatic “character.” In Ivakhiv’s construction, the interaction between objectness (often of setting) and subjectness (often of human characters) is always in flux, becoming through interaction, shifting position from moment to moment as a film unfolds.26 One of the powers of After the Flood is the way the performers’ looking at and physically relating to the environment of Gao’s paintings is opened to exquisite scrutiny through the film’s slow pacing and stripping away of cues to narrative “action.”

Floods and Forests

187

Ethics and Boundaries Suppositional strategies are also in play in the way the two works portray the boundary territory between human and extrahuman spheres. Ivakhiv offers productive points of inquiry in this regard, asking whether the boundary is presented as stable, unstable, or nonexistent and to what extent the extrahuman elements are portrayed in terms of their similarity to or difference from humans.27 In Wild Man, Gao establishes a porous boundary territory and offers a range of strategies for its penetration. The urbanite Ecologist needs a guide up into the mountainous region. The young boy Xi Mao runs easily between spheres: for him the boundary does not exist. He reports finding the Wild Man caught in a trap, helpless and weeping, rather than vicious, as one might expect from a cornered wild beast. Instead of feeling fear, Xi Mao reports feeling sorry for the Wild Man and helping him escape. While others debate the veracity of the boy’s story, as a description of offstage action it emphasizes similarities between humans and wild men and requires the audience to imagine the encounter before they have witnessed the Wild Man for themselves.28 Gao’s suggestive dramaturgy invites human actors to portray trees and birds in close succession with human activity, while holding the only actual appearance of the Wild Man until the final moments of the play. Meanwhile, the human characters discuss these extrahuman representatives across a range of perspectives, from attempted domination to deep sympathy. A particularly interesting boundary negotiation occurs as villagers debate how like or unlike “humans” wild men are (again, before the audience has seen one). No one is disturbed that a villager called Hothead has tasted the “meat” of a wild man killed by a hunter. Only when he compares the taste to human flesh is there an uproar —“You eat hu ...” He retorts: “The smell. Like those bandits in the hills when I found them dead, the same smell.”29 For the villagers, the Wild Man remains decidedly “other,” ineligible for cannibalism. At the same time, Hothead’s awkward attempt to reassert a stable boundary between human flesh and animal meat calls strong attention to the arbitrariness of the division, a point perhaps emphasized in our 2014 production,

188

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

because the same actor played Hothead in this scene as well as the Wild Man in the ending. There are no animal or tree emissaries between spheres of After the Flood, and its compositional choices construct the extrahuman boundary quite rigidly. The performers gaze at, attempt to imitate, and travel along the vertical plane of the images projected on the backdrop but, in the aesthetic rules of engagement established by film, they cannot enter. They remain exiled in a liminal space between the projected paintings and the camera. Movement in the film occurs in three dimensions: 1) the projection of the painting on the backdrop zooms in and out, and pans from side to side; 2) the human performers’ own physical movement; and 3) the camera shooting both of these moving layers but also able to zoom and pan independently. No other modes of animation are employed.30 The three dimensions coexist within the framed image but cannot interpenetrate except suppositionally, through the viewer’s imagination. Because it adopts a theatrical style that acknowledges a clear physical boundary around the area in which the performers move and the physical edges of Gao’s paintings, After the Flood can usefully be considered a “closed form” cinematic composition. The frame of the shot is emphasized and operates similarly to a proscenium arch, blocking off expectation that viewers will be given access to additional information that they might expect in “open form” composition about a world continuing beyond the frame.31 As I have argued elsewhere discussing moving-image adaptations of xiqu stage performances, the closed form of a “filmed theater” approach encourages viewers to engage their imagination to supply any information “missing” from a shot, as viewers do in a theater where they can see the physical edges of the playing space.32

Eco-Ethical Polyphony In both Wild Man and After the Flood, Gao adopts a nonlinear structure: short scenes appear in nonchronological, noncausal order, requiring the

Floods and Forests

189

viewer actively to gather the scenes into a meaningful progression and inviting eco-ethical working through of the interrelationships of human and more-than-human spheres. In Wild Man, the narrative threads wind around each other, maintaining and building theatrical tension without resort to Aristotelian cause and effect. Major plot lines remain unresolved. Gao asserts that the connecting thread holding the play together is the flow of Ecologist’s random thoughts.33 But even this hold is incomplete, since Ecologist disappears before the end of the play. The action shifts easily across boundaries of time and space, for example, a prehistoric shaman’s rainmaking ritual is juxtaposed with a scene of TV journalists covering the bursting of a dam due to flooding. Gao calls the structure of Wild Man “polyphonic,” relying on the musical technique in which several melodic lines are joined in equitable juxtaposition that creates satisfying resonance rather than the rising conflict of conventional Aristotelian dramatic structure. In the words of Gao’s Ecologist: “People and birds should be friends … and people and trees. Where there’s a forest, people can have a good life.”34 On the one hand, Ecologist offers an anthropocentric worldview that radically oversimplifies human– environment interrelationships. On the other hand, he is speaking to the seven-year-old boy Xi Mao who, like most kids, has a highly ecoethically engaged universe of potential friends—including trees, birds, and wild men. The scene appears near the end of the play, by which time variations of human–forest interactions, including drought, deforestation, and devastating flooding, have also been forcefully staged. Bakhtin’s use of the term “polyphony” in literary criticism demands that voices are given independent expression. He famously asserted that polyphony was not possible in drama because “The characters come together dialogically in the unified field of vision of author, director, and audience, against the clearly defined background of a single tiered world.”35 Bakhtin is assuming exactly the kind of Aristotelian dramaturgy that Gao is working to disrupt. Jessica Yeung argues, however, that while Gao’s later plays achieve this effect, Wild Man cannot be considered polyphonic in the Bakhtinian sense “because the right and wrong are

190

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

simply so obvious and Ecologist’s ethical superiority runs through the entire play almost too easily.”36 In my experience directing Wild Man, Ecologist is a deeply ambivalent character: both his wife and a local peasant girl accuse him of causing them great pain through his selfish behavior; his credibility as a conservationist is repeatedly undercut by other characters mistaking him for a “Wild Man hunter”; and his victory obtaining an order from offstage authorities to turn the local forest into a nature reserve has been achieved without consulting the local people whose lives depend on forest access. In the English translation, his last line in the play is counteracted by his action: he says, “I’ll see you again,”37 but we do not. Gao himself specifically rejects that the narrative strands of the play construct any conflict at all, and so clearly did not intend to achieve dialectical synthesis.38 Nonetheless, Yeung finds ethical closure in the ending sequence, which arguably conveys events in Xi Mao’s dream: boy and Wild Man playing together conveying a “wish for the next generation to live harmoniously with nature.”39 In contrast, both Sy Ren Quah and Gilbert Fong find deep ambivalence rather than optimism:40 such human–extrahuman cooperation is possible only in a boy’s dream.41 After the Flood, with its absence of language and character, maintains an even stronger polyphonic openness. Each stanza offers a new painting, a new dancer or group and series of abstracted gestures, and a new relationship between these elements and between the performer(s) and the camera/viewer. As Gao notes, “The narrative structure common to film also is abandoned, so each scene can be viewed either as painting or as photographs that are linked only by movements or sounds.” Sound, movement, and image operate in autonomous counterpoint, none given priority.42 With few exceptions, the pace within each segment is slow, and yet no segment lasts long enough for me to satisfy my exploration of possible meanings and relationships: Is the performer being “shaped” by her environment as she embodies a curve in the image behind? Is it gravity or exhaustion that pulls a performer toward the floor with the downward pan of the background image? Is the prone nude body sleeping or dead? Each new stanza ignites a new set of questions. My

Floods and Forests

191

senses are heightened by the exquisitely detailed looking and listening provoked by the film’s slow pace and minimalist aesthetic, by the kinaesthetic empathy evoked by moving bodies working in relationship to the implied movement of brush strokes in the painting and the actual movement of projected images. The kinaesthetic and emotional processes of the film construct rich performative pressures on my conceptions of environmental interrelationships. In both the play and the film, Gao’s polyphonic construction adamantly holds space, allowing each element full expression in an eco-ethically open and reciprocal exchange.

Conclusion Matthew Turner observes that a key aesthetic aim of the traditional Chinese painter was to achieve “spiritual resonance”; rejecting commercial gain and political influence as motivation, the artist needed to “be a part of nature itself in order to bring out the appropriate representation of nature.”43 Returning from five months of self-imposed exile in mountainous regions of southwest China, Gao wrote Wild Man in his own wild burst of intensive effort.44 He explains his painting technique as similarly intense, as a kind of transcendental dance begun by entering an expressive state listening to music. The first brush stroke is key, the following strokes are “spontaneously created” in a physically and spiritually grueling process that leaves him aching in every joint and from which it takes him a week to recover.45 McConachie urges: “The arts are not secondary reflections of experience; imaginative engagement in the arts provides real experiences that change who we are and can motivate progressive change in the world.”46 While Gao rejects many of the constraints of traditional Chinese painting and would likely find McConachie’s call too political, through his rigorously embodied artistic practice he has produced works such as Wild Man and After the Flood that generate deep spiritual resonance with the more-than-human world and activate for their viewers real experiences of ecological reciprocity and community.

192

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Notes 1. Gao Xingjian, “After the Flood,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), 225. 2. Gao Xingjian, “Freedom and Literature,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, 233. 3. Gao, “Environment and Literature,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, 192. 4. Bruce McConachie, “Theorizing Eco-Performance: Ethics, Evolution, Ecology, and Performance,” in Readings in Performance and Ecology, ed. Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 98. 5. Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), 256. 6. Gao Xingjian, “Wild Man: A Contemporary Chinese Spoken Drama,” trans. with an introduction by Bruno Roubicek, Asian Theatre Journal 7, no. 2 (Autumn 1990): 184–249. 7. Gao Xingjian, After the Flood (Madrid: Circulo de Lectores, 2008), DVD. 8. Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, eds, Readings in Performance and Ecology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–3. 9. Bruno Roubicek, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Gao, “Wild Man: A Contemporary Chinese Spoken Drama,” Asian Theater Journal 7, no. 2 (1990): 184–191. 10. Ewan Coleman, “Theatre Review: Asian Play Resonates with New Zealand Audiences,” The Dominion Post, May 23, 2014, A10. 11. See Gao, “After the Flood,” 222. 12. Gao Xingjian, “The Potential of Theatre,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, 46. 13. Yan Haiping, “Theatricality in Classical Chinese Drama,” in Theatricality, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 84. 14. Yan, “Theatricality,” 86. 15. Ibid. 16. Adrian J. Ivakhiv, “Nature’s Nation: Improvisation, Democracy, and Ken Burns’ National Parks,” Environmental Communication 4, no. 4 (December 2010): 467. 17. Gao, “Wild Man: A Contemporary Chinese Spoken Drama,” 194n4. 18. Ibid., 210–211.

Floods and Forests

193

19. Gao, “After the Flood,” 222–223. 20. Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image, 88. 21. Inner Landscape (1998) is the title of one of Gao’s paintings included in Jason Kuo’s extensive edited collection: Jason C. Kuo, The Inner Landscape: The Paintings of Gao Xingjian (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2013), 134. 22. Gao, “After the Flood,” 222. 23. Ibid., 223. 24. Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image, 88. 25. Daniel Bergez, Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul, trans. Sherry Buchanan (London: Asia Ink, 2013), 156. 26. Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image, 257. 27. Ibid., 247. 28. Gao, “Wild Man: A Contemporary Chinese Spoken Drama,” 219–220, 223–224. 29. Ibid., 215–216. 30. As an interesting comparative example, a short video was composed for Gao’s appearance at the 2010 Prague Writers’ Festival. The videographer animated the human figures of Gao’s paintings to move within and between the painted landscapes. Rather than imitating human locomotion (Gao’s figures rarely have visible legs), instead the figures sweep in or dissolve out, echoing the bleed and flow of ink in Gao’s painting technique, which is also depicted in the video: Petr Tomaides and tomato22.net, Gao Xingjian—Mystical Introduction, Tomato22 Dreamin’ Pictures, https:// youtu.be/Dhe4evIn-0s. 31. Louis Gianetti, Understanding Movies, 11th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2008), 91–92. 32. Megan Evans, “Chinese ‘Xiqu’ Performance and Moving-Image Media,” Theatre Research International 34, no. 1 (2009): 26–27. 33. Gao, “The Potential of Theatre,” 46. 34. Gao, “Wild Man: A Contemporary Chinese Spoken Drama,” 239. 35. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 17. 36. Jessica Yeung, Ink Dances in Limbo: Gao Xingjian’s Writing as Cultural Translation (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 64. 37. Gao, “Wild Man: A Contemporary Chinese Spoken Drama,” 242. 38. Gao, “The Potential of Theatre,” 44. 39. Yeung, Ink Dances in Limbo, 64.

194

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

40. Sy Ren Quah, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 88–89; Gilbert C.F. Fong, “Wild Man and the Idea of Freedom,” in Polyphony Embodied: Freedom and Fate in Gao Xingjian’s Writings, ed. Michael Lackner and Nikola Chardonnens (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2014), 114–115. 41. In our 2014 production, the playful interaction between Xi Mao and the Wild Man was interrupted by the entrance of five human figures in Hazmat suits and gas masks, harbingers of a near future inspired by images of dire air pollution in Beijing and dying rivers in New Zealand’s dairy country. Disrupting a reading that this was the boy’s dream, the gasmasked figures wrenched the boy from the Wild Man and dragged him out of sight. The Wild Man raced around the stage frantically attempting to rescue the boy, only to become entangled in hunting ropes set as a trap by the Wild Man Investigation Team. The Ecologist, our putative conscience guide, had abandoned us several scenes earlier, any eco-ethical closure achieved by his victory in establishing a nature reserve rendered irrelevant by impending eco-apocalypse. 42. Gao, “Wild Man: A Contemporary Chinese Spoken Drama,” 222. 43. Matthew Turner, “Classical Chinese Landscape Painting and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 43, no. 1 (2009): 111. 44. Fong, “Wild Man and the Idea of Freedom,” 105. 45. Mabel Lee, “Gao Xingjian’s Transcultural Aesthetics in Fiction, Theater, Art, and Film,” in Lackner and Chardonnens, eds,, Polyphony Embodied, 35–36. For a video of Gao at work on his painting, see Corinne Dardé, Gao Xingjian Portrait, Vimeo.com, https://vimeo.com/130184886, sec. 4:35–11:35. 46. McConachie, “Ethics, Evolution, Ecology, Performance,” 98.

Chapter 13

Bodies and Paintings Gao Xingjian’s After the Flood Fiona Sze-Lorrain Stripped of language, color, and any length past half an hour, After the Flood (Après le déluge, 2008) raises the stakes in Gao Xingjian’s commitment to the difficult genre of cine-poetry. Gao’s debut feature, Silhouette/Shadow (La Silhouette sinon l’ombre, 2005), contains French and Chinese excerpts from his opera (Snow in August), play (The Man Who Questions Death), and poem (“The Way of the Wandering Bird”). After the Flood, however, is a tripartite film, which Gao defines as one “isolating audio-language from the concept of audiovisual” and “refers to the picture, sounds and language each having independence and autonomy, while complementing, combining and contrasting with one another to produce new meanings.”1 By dispensing with audio-language, and even a script, Gao’s sophomore film encodes music and silence with the potential for speech or audio logic. At the same time, it dramatizes physical bodies as visible, symbolic, and emotional objects whose impact on viewers is heightened by the appearance of dancers against and within a backdrop of paintings. This elemental quality of After the Flood

196

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

marks a clearer shift from allegory to vision and from the pictorial to the philosophical than its more ambitious predecessor, even though its central theme is none other than the plight of humanity after an ecological crisis. Disaster films such as After the Flood risk falling into a stereotypical catastrophe aftermath in which one of the protagonists emerges from the central narrative as the hero or savior. How, then, could After the Flood be structured to keep clichés in check? Gao finds the answer by keeping the film short and cutting out language and narrative: “The film is different from usual disaster films in that it constitutes painting and performance and is devoid of reality. The narrative structure common to film also is abandoned, so each scene can be viewed either as paintings or as photographs that are linked only by movements or sounds.”2 The filmmaker’s description of his own film as “devoid of reality” refers to his rejection of an Aristotelian mimesis. Discarding a linear narrative in this way reinforces his desire to create a film that believes more in enactment and reenactment than it does in catharsis. Note too his use of the more generic word “performance” rather than “acting.” In this case, the mode of “performance” is dance. Dance as a “movement veiled in immobility”3 has its roots in ancient ritual and continuance as a timeless spiritual practice that situates a body in the cosmos by forging an alliance between the human and the universe via forces of opposites.4 In After the Flood, dance articulates violence instead of pleasure, displays tension and discomfort instead of balance and, while it still feeds on Eros, does not seek desire. None of the six contemporary dancers that figure prominently in the film incarnates a specific personage until the pivotal eleventh minute: the camera zooms in on hideous chunks of gray and black suspended amid metallic bolts of thunder. At this juncture, an apparently androgynous dancer appears, cloaked and hooded in black, back to the viewer and bearing an aura of dark mystery and ill omen. With the flood running its course, the viewer has already internalized several visceral scenes where dancers contort their bodies, embodying the shock and destruction brought on by the

Bodies and Paintings

197

floodwaters. Drifting across the dense but sinister segments of gray and black meshed against one another, the dancer slowly turns his/her head around, glancing sideways, and the audience now sees that this is a she— a woman, the personification of birth and fertility, a manifestation that prophesizes a new genesis after the flood. The film features about fifty ink paintings by Gao himself. Several of them, including Les auspices, L’absorption, L’aliénation, La fin du monde, Annonciation, L’éclat, and Les messagers, were completed in 2006 and are from his apocalyptic series “The End of the World” (La Fin du monde), exhibited in Koblenz, Germany, in 2007. Of the paintings used in his film, Gao notes that “only six directly manifest disaster; the others have their own individual themes, either the vast cosmos with its undefined space or isolated men and women who manifest certain mental images: these are all visions of the inner mind that are often evoked when one loses oneself in deep thought. There are also more expressive works, like Birth and Tranquility, that verge on the abstract but still retain images: Whether the paintings are more realistic or more abstract, they remain in between the two, and this is the underlying direction of my art and the means through which ample space for the imagination is provided to both artist and viewers.”5 In almost every scene, the camera zooms in and out of a certain motif while one or more dancers are superimposed over the painting, a technique that immerses the viewer in the visual world of painting as much as in the movement of the dance. In short, the visual field is prescribed by the painting. What appears, vanishes, re-emerges, or is erased and replaced in a continuum are traces of a painting and a perceived image. On the other hand, what is being displaced, transported, and preserved through these (dis)appearances are bodies that are resisting their own monumentalization, their time and tension. The film is essentially a laboratory that functions on ghosted spaces, deleted meanings, and fissures: a repository of changing histories and futures through each

198

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

dancer who embodies a psyche, and the painting projects each of these psyches onscreen, as a map of its flow and potential. By incorporating his own large ink paintings into his film, Gao blurs the boundary between representation and reproduction, demarcating their differences and (im)possibilities: when a painting is viewed as moving— often in a straightforward, vertical “up-down” mode—the dancers need to be presented as fixed, and vice versa. It is inconceivable for the eye to identify both paintings and dancers as moving objects since the paintings and dancers move only in relation to one another, which is to say that their movement makes cinematic sense only when seen as relative to one other, even when the eye fails to determine the deciding agent. Yet, within his or her time–space, each dancer is capable of executing choreographed moves by using a vocabulary of body gestures that seems at once contingent upon and liberated from the painting behind. As such, the definition of movement derives not from motion but from the juxtaposition of two media, each with its own perceived reality, which deconstructs, and in time eradicates, the dimensionality that conventionally defines and measures an image in its geometric world. By extension, After the Flood eludes the idea of space as a “horrible outside–inside”6 or “inside–outside,”7 privileging a liminal space where “the mind has lost its geometrical homeland and the spirit is drifting.”8 The dancers, like the paintings, are consequently both object and image, rendering redundant the “code” that exists “between the object and its image,”9 fulfilling what Barthes characterizes as a message without a code, the trait unique to a “photographic image.”10 And this may be how Gao’s film invites debate on what filmmaking is—to transcend the virtual by filming not just the object but also its image and shadow, the salient impermanence.

Bodies and Paintings

199

Notes 1. Gao Xingjian, “Concerning Silhouette/Shadow,” trans. Mabel Lee, in Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian, ed. Fiona Sze-Lorrain (Paris: Contours, 2007), 22. 2. Gao Xingjian, “After the Flood,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), 222. 3. Sondra Horton Fraleigh, “Dance Tension,” in Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 93. 4. Fraleigh, “Cosmic Motion and Dance Tension,” in Dance and the Lived Body, 78–81; and see Heidegger’s “world–earth opposites” in Fraleigh, “Phenomenal Tensions in Dance,” in Dance and the Lived Body, 82–83. 5. Gao, “After the Flood,” 222–223. 6. Gaston Bachelard, “The Dialectics of Outside and Inside,” in The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), 218. 7. Bachelard, “The Dialectics of Outside and Inside,” 217. 8. Ibid., 218. 9. Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image– Music– Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 17. 10. Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 17 (italics are in the original).

Chapter 14

From Theater to Cine-Poetry Gao Xingjian’s Performance Theories Wah Guan Lim Ten years after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Gao Xingjian, a multifaceted artist accomplished in theater, fiction, poetry, and painting, has moved into filmmaking. As in his art making in these various genres, Gao does not follow convention and, proposing that his films are a “new epic,” he calls them “cinematic poetry” or “cine-poems.” How has Gao’s dramaturgy changed from his previous work in fiction and playwriting to his films? How have the performance theories that so distinguished him from his peers in Chinese dramatic arts continued? What do his unconventional drama and cine-poetry say about his politics? This essay1 attempts to unpack some of these issues by drawing on examples from Gao’s latest film, Requiem for Beauty (2013),2 his plays, and his dramatic theories. In the words of Henry Yiheng Zhao, Gao is famous for “seldom show[ing] interest in portraying characters,” and his first play, Absolute Signal, was officially criticized for blurring characterization.3 His later plays problematized characterization even further: some of them contain

202

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

figures that are almost totally devoid of the personal traits usually found in the Western realist convention. Indeed, far from being what Mick Wallis and Simon Shepherd would classify as “rounded characters,” such as Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, it might be difficult to call them “characters,” as many do not present the complexity one would expect in an “adequately scripted character.”4 We see an increase in this reduction in realist characterization in each of Gao’s new works, culminating in his recent films that do not contain characters in the realist sense at all. This development raises several questions about dramaturgy and performance: for example, how does one who is not interested in characterization write plays and films—genres that traditionally rely on the dramatic tensions among the characters to create the mise-en-scène? How would the works of such a playwright be formulated and performed?

From Tripartition of Performance to Tripartite Film While Gao was building a reputation for success on the sensational impact of his plays Absolute Signal (1982), Bus Stop (1983), Wild Man (1985), and The Other Shore (1986), earning the title of “undisputed leader of Chinese experimental theater,”5 he began displaying an interest in filmmaking. What later were rewritten and published as the short stories “Huadou” (1985), “Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather” (1986), and “In an Instant” (1991) were his attempts at writing film scripts that had failed to materialize owing to political or other circumstances.6 The three films he has completed to date—Silhouette/Shadow (2006), After the Flood (2008), and Requiem for Beauty—are “free from narration, and neither depend on the lens’ editorial process to narrate a story nor comment on an event.”7 It is evident from these words that Gao is seeking an alternative other than mainstream narrative and documentary films, and I see these explorations in filmmaking as experiments that he has further extended from his plays. Sy Ren Quah argues that Gao’s search for “an alternative aesthetics” began when he sought to break away from the realist conventions of

From Theater to Cine-Poetry

203

Chinese spoken drama.8 Critical of its overt reliance on dialogue that limited the performative potential of theater, Gao sought methods other than linear narration, so that his plays—especially those written since his exile in France—are distinguished by a reduction in psychological and social type characterization in two phases. The first phase is marked by Gao’s strategy of “tripartition of performance,”9 and the second is distinguished by Gao’s actors adopting the first-, second-, and thirdperson narrative to play different personae of his stage figures. Scholars Gilbert Fong and Sy Ren Quah, among others, have written extensively on these dramaturgical techniques.10 I will add that the entity created during the “neutral” state of performance—a liminal mental state before an actor fully enters a character/role—and by extension the different personae in the shifting pronouns is akin to the entity of the Brechtian actor–commentator, who both embodies and critically demonstrates the character they are playing, remaining fully aware of the stage artifice. In distancing his actors from characters, Gao also alienates his audience from the fictional events of the stage, and thus empowers the audience by providing a platform from which to critique and reflect consciously. The need (for both actors and audience) to be independent critical thinkers and avoid becoming a blind collective, which might in turn be manipulated by politicians, is a theme Gao repeatedly evokes, as in The Other Shore (1986) and Escape (1989). Therefore, I argue that Gao’s move away from characterization in the realist convention is informed primarily by his purpose of creating conscious actors and a reflective audience. Gao’s artistic explorations within the confines of individual genres tested their limitations in a bid to expand their creative potential. He has proposed at least two ways of creating new art: One involves conceptual changes to create forms with new meaning, whereas the other does not put forth new concepts but instead develops new expressions within existing forms. The latter type of innovation seeks to discover new possibilities for expression within the rules of existing forms and, within the old

204

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics forms or at their extremities, opens up a new territory whose extremities are likewise inexhaustible.11

It is apparent that the second impulse determined Gao’s experimentation in drama and cinema. The essence of theater, for Gao, has probably much in common with Jerzy Grotowski’s (1933–1999) concept of “Poor Theater,” wherein the essential theater is nothing more than a confrontation between a naked actor and a live spectator.12 Even though Gao’s actors may not be naked in the Grotowskian sense, because they are masked by his text, the most vital element in Gao’s theater is undoubtedly the performance of his actors in the presence of a live audience. Anything can be dramatized and performed in Gao’s plays, even the other selves of the same character, as demonstrated by the shifting pronouns employed in Between Life and Death (1991), Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992), Nocturnal Wanderer (1993), and Weekend Quartet (1996). By separating the “neutral actor” from the actor-self and character-self, Gao stretched the prevailing idea in conventional theater of an actor putting on his role; in The Man Who Questions Death (2003) he took one further step to externalize this other self. Nonhuman entities, such as “music, sound effects, movement, the look of the eyes and changes in posture could also take on performing roles,” Gao proclaims in the postscript to The Other Shore.13 Likewise in his films, instead of relying on narrative logic to tell a story, he tries to explore other cinematic possibilities of expression. Auteurs like Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) and Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) have already made significant achievements in art films, but the overt commercialization of films that cater to worldwide mass cultural consumption has made it “harder and harder for art films to reach viewers.”14 Therefore, Gao’s efforts at experimental filmmaking can be considered denunciations of the commercialization of art and calling our attention to valuing the independence of art making. Just as Gao’s tripartition of performance encapsulates the distinctive features of his dramatic theories, what distinguishes his cinematic poetry lies in his cinematic theory of “tripartite film”:

From Theater to Cine-Poetry

205

The picture, sounds, and language, each have independence and autonomy, but each complements, combines with, and contrasts with the others to produce new meanings. In this understanding, sounds and language can cease to be subsidiary components that are subordinate to the picture. Instead, each of the three can predominate to form a relatively independent theme, and the other two serve to complement or contrast. In this way, film becomes a composite art of all three components and not simply one in which the picture always prevails and determines everything.15 A major contribution of Gao’s dramatic theory to global theater is his discovery of an intermediate phase between actor and character. The plays he wrote, beginning with The Other Shore and more fully developed in France, were aimed at giving free rein to the “neutral actor” in this liminal state to explore the possibilities of performance apart from laminating actor directly onto character. His tripartite film aims similarly to provide autonomy to the different cinematic components to expand their expressivity. In conventional filmmaking, the picture is prioritized over all other elements, which are used only to explain the picture.16 However, Gao espouses that cinema also possesses the qualities of drama, painting, music, and literature, and these other elements have yet to be fully utilized in filmmaking.17 By isolating language and sound from picture, Gao aims to release them from their subsidiary roles and allow each component to unleash its individual creative potential. It is perhaps too early to say if Gao has succeeded. But his attempts to enrich the range of artistic expression in film have certainly opened a very different aesthetic quality to filmmaking and developed a new style of cinematic appreciation. Like his later plays, Gao’s films defy the logic of linear narrative. His latest, Requiem for Beauty, for instance, is based on the text of his prose poem of the same title,18 diegetically narrated in French, Mandarin, and English, with almost no dialogue between characters. The film begins with a group of actors getting ready for a rehearsal, with the camera lens cutting into subsequent shots showing these actors in different scenes,

206

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

posing in stills or moving in sequences, superimposed on Gao’s paintings or scenery collected during his travels in Berlin, Luxembourg, and New York, as well as the streets of Hong Kong and the Carnival of Venice. On top of paying tribute to artists from antiquity to contemporary times— from the Greek artists who had created the ancient sculptures of Venus to Botticelli, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dante, Rodin, Mozart, and Munch— the purpose of the film is, in Gao’s words, to invoke the revival of beauty and the coming of a renaissance during our time of spiritual emptiness.19 The theme of the cine-poem is a continuation of that in the play The Man Who Questions Death, about a man trapped in a modern art museum expressing his grief to his alter ego about the death of great art and literature, and condemning the market for dictating the tastes of art consumption. In the film, Gao laments the ubiquity of advertisements, paparazzi, and political slogans, which stifles what little space is left for aesthetic presence. While Gao has experienced a newfound freedom for artistic expression uninhibited by ideological factors since relocating to France, he has had to confront a new pressure that was perhaps not as apparent back in China during the 1980s: the market. Gao decries that “the subverting of aesthetics in this very commercialized society rapidly mutated into fashionable consumerism,” and has a strong oppositional stance against art that panders to the tastes of an anti-intellectual market. He laments, “The political, social, and aesthetic rebellion that was inherent in the attack and destruction of art traditions … has now completely vanished in the wake of commercial globalization.”20 That Gao’s films will never reach a wider mainstream audience appears to matter little to him. He reasons that it is not that “audiences do not want to see them but because the market mechanism has blocked the distribution channels for art films.”21 Yet this is precisely the kind of film Gao wants to make.22 Although he made this comment while shooting Silhouette/Shadow, his anticonsumerist position is equally apparent in his other two films. As he himself has said, “Once the filmmaker is able to free oneself from chasing after trends, ignore the market and political correctness, and thereby immerse oneself in making films independently, one will discover

From Theater to Cine-Poetry

207

that cinema possesses technical means and artistic potential yet to be revealed.”23 Of his films, Gao states that “Since there is no plot, there is no need to create characters,”24 seemingly continuing the approach to characterization adopted in his plays. These figures who are absent from Gao’s films refer, of course, to “rounded characters” in the Western realist convention. The characters in Gao’s films, though, do not speak in the three shifting pronouns but appear to fit the “neutral actor” mode where one can switch quickly between roles and is highly conscious of his/her actor position. In Requiem for Beauty, for instance, thirty-eight actors assume a myriad character roles, such as Poet, Thinker, and an Elderly Man representing the Psyche, and other more identifiable figures ranging from God to the Devil, Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Ophelia. Gao requests that, while playing their roles, his cast not hide their actor identity but instead create original images through their performance.25 He states, for example: “In a nonverbal cinematic poem of this kind, the poetic sense is manifested through the paintings as well as the performance, so the performers do not need to act specific roles but instead resort only to body movements and expressions.”26 As director-playwright, Gao provides general guidelines that allow his actors freedom in the filming process, and only during editing does he critique the shots and sequences to be finalized. Here Gao raises a new dramaturgical question: apart from an actor’s realistic documentation and performance of a role, are there other possibilities of performance in front of the camera?27 The strategy of the “third eye” is similarly at work in Requiem for Beauty, where the figure of the Thinker is constantly depicted. Visible to the spectators, the Thinker always stands apart from the mise-en-scène— which might consist of the Thinker, such as in the Venice Carnival scene where everyone, including the Thinker, is dressed in mask and costume; however, not once does he take part in the carnival. He consciously keeps a critical distance to observe quietly, with very little action, as opposed to the spirited movements and lively sounds of the carnival celebrations.

208

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

A group of actors in white robes motion in a struggling pose as an onlooker scrutinizes them. These figures observing on the periphery are reminiscent of the external eye staring at the female protagonist in Between Life and Death, as well as That Man in The Man Who Questions Death. To establish critical reflection in the performance of his plays, Gao instructs his neutral actors to assume their roles as if watched by an exterior “third eye”; this “third eye” constantly surveying the actors will prevent them from fully entering their roles. Instead, the actors must challenge, tease, empathize with, sympathize with, and admire the characters they are playing, and through their continued attempts at maneuvering and finding ways to play the characters, make them come alive.28 By fulfilling the function of scrutinizing the self, these elements in turn force the protagonist in both plays to speak in the second-person pronoun. As discussed earlier, this state of neutrality not only allows the actors to be constantly aware of and critique their roles; more importantly, it also challenges the audience to distance themselves emotionally from the staged spectacle and to reflect on their own condition. In Requiem for Beauty, although the actors do not speak in the voices of shifting pronouns, Gao employs other techniques to make spectators aware that they are watching a staged event by having his actors undertake multiple role doubling on top of having the Thinker scrutinize the mise-en-scène from the periphery. This attitude of ensuring a reflective audience is consistent with Gao’s position of creating a theater wherein the critical mind is constantly at work. In Gao’s view, “Film is not simply for popular cultural consumption but can also provoke deep thinking and reflection in viewers.”29 In Requiem for Beauty, the foreground and background images seem at times deliberately out of sync, and at other times the scenes appear to contrast dramatically with the preceding and following images, as if to shock the viewer into contemplation in the Artaudian sense. In one scene set against the city’s night skyline, for instance, a contortionist, a cabaret performer, a singer, and the Thinker take turns to strike poses, perform, and walk in the foreground. In another, an onlooker scrutinizes a group in white

From Theater to Cine-Poetry

209

striking awkward poses as they seem to struggle. Immediately juxtaposed on this image, the next frame depicts a lone woman draped in black, twirling slowly, with images of skulls moving past her in the background that are reminiscent of the Holocaust. Such starkly contrasting imagery prevents the spectator from being completely immersed in the miseen-scène, not unlike Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt that Gao frequently employs in his plays. Although Gao’s film does not require his actors to step out of the characters they are playing to disrupt the flow of the narrative, as is expected in Brecht’s technique, both methods are “a call to halt … holding something up to the light, making us look again.”30 By interrupting total absorption in the witnessed spectacle, Brecht and Gao therefore encourage the audience to “adopt a more critical, ‘alienated’ way of seeing outside” the staged performance in relation to their own social lives.31 In addition, a nude actor in a seated position resting his chin on one hand as though in deep thought, evoking the image of Rodin’s The Thinker, inspires reflection. The still silence in the film, at times for brief moments and at others for extensive periods, again forces the unsuspecting viewer to pause for reflection. Toward the end of the film, people trapped in an enclosed room futilely attempt to break out of the frame to move toward the spectators. Other frames show multitudes being fired up, and I am reminded of the three characters in Escape who yearn to break out, except that there appears to be no way of escape. Similarly, the protagonist in The Man Who Questions Death can find no resolution in his life, which results in his suicide. In Requiem for Beauty, beauty is pronounced dead by having a group of people dressed in black—perhaps in mourning—cover with a black cloth the bare breast of a dead woman. Although the film appears to end on a bleak note, Gao’s critical attitude is constantly at work, announcing, “Since God is dead, his son Jesus Christ even died before him. What is left are these so-called saviors who cannot stop making a fuss while casting illusions.” Gao views Jesus’s sacrifice for humankind to be in vain, because the uncritical multitude keep erecting their own faux saviors. One such example is the evil Card Player in The Other Shore, who

210

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

manipulates the crowd and coerces them to force the protagonist Man into submission. Gao’s disdain for the infinitely inflating Nietzschean ego is perhaps best expounded in his Nobel speech: “The writer cannot fill the role of the Creator, so there is no need for him to inflate his ego by thinking that he is God. This will not only bring about psychological dysfunction and turn him into a madman. … Needless to say he will turn himself into a sacrifice for the future and also demand that others follow suit in sacrificing themselves.”32 While hordes of people in his plays and films are seeking to be saved, Gao’s warnings against the temptation to be a savior suggest he has other agendas. As I have indicated elsewhere, a character highly reflective of his circumstances and who dares to act differently from the crowd recurs in several of Gao’s plays.33 Whether it is the Silent Man in Bus Stop, the protagonist who refuses to be the leader of the crowd in The Other Shore, the Middle-Aged Man in Escape, or Huineng in Snow in August, these are men who make a conscious decision to walk away from the collective, which would otherwise have imprisoned them mentally.34 These are self-critical and reflective individuals who, like Gao, know that they are incapable of saving others. Indeed, Noël Dutrait adds that, unlike Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, Marx, Nietzsche, or Chairman Mao, Huineng—and therefore Gao—does not consider himself a messiah.35 The Thinker in Requiem for Beauty plays a similar role. He does not directly engage with other characters in the film but scrutinizes the mise-enscène from the periphery in a bid to prevent his viewers from becoming totally absorbed, and thus inspires them to reflect. In Gao’s eyes, neither he nor the protagonists in his plays are capable of saving others,36 and only through critical reflection and self-contemplation can we hope to avoid manipulation by others and thus achieve redemption.

Conclusion Since the early 1980s, when he sought to expand the expressivity of theater by breaking out of the stifling and outdated socialist–realist performance

From Theater to Cine-Poetry

211

methods that had shackled Chinese drama, Gao has never stopped looking for alternative ways of artistic expression. These experiments, which continued in the various artistic genres that Gao practiced, responded to different specificities and political contexts in each phase of his life. Evidence suggests that Gao’s shifting-pronoun technique could have already been emerging in 1981 with the publication of his Preliminary Explorations in the Art of Modern Fiction, wherein two chapters—“Shifts in Pronouns” and “The Third-Person Pronoun ‘S/he’”—detail ways of switching among the three pronouns to increase possibilities in fiction writing. Indeed, this shifting pronoun technique had amply materialized during the eight-year period (1982–1989) that he spent writing his novel Soul Mountain, and predates his postexile plays. One only need remember that Gao is a multitalented artist who is a successful painter, essayist, novelist, and playwright and see his works in these various disciplines to be convinced that the different art forms overlap and influence one another dynamically in his mode of operation. Even in his paintings one can detect an exterior view that is simultaneously scrutinizing and dialoguing with the painter.37 Gao is well known as a promoter of “cold literature”—where writers coldly observe the spectacle around them but do not get emotionally engulfed, and are able to write with a distanced and critical mind. Cold literature is Gao’s response to the “vehement and feverish literature of the Cultural Revolution” where individuals lost their senses and were engulfed in the maddening and fanatical roaring of the blind collective.38 He notes in his Nobel Lecture that contemporary Chinese intellectual history has witnessed an era where literature was “deeply scarred by politics and power,” and therefore the writer had no choice but to flee to preserve his artistic independence; thus, Gao embarked on a self-imposed exile to France that “afforded him fresh perspectives for observation.”39 His nagging suspicion that “the center as the site of power represents constraints, manipulation and repression leading to the loss of freedom”40 and subsequent flight from politics contributed to the creation of his

212

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

unique tripartition of performance and shifting-pronouns technique, dramaturgical methods that detach the actor from the character-self and enable the actor to examine the performance from a critical distance. In his films, Gao has employed various strategies to achieve similar aims: separating sound and language from picture, discarding linear narration, juxtaposing discordant images, and using silence (for example, in Requiem for Beauty, having the figure of the Thinker constantly scrutinize the mise-en-scène). These are all techniques to prevent the audience from becoming completely immersed in the spectacle, to ensure that reflection will be provoked. Like Brecht, Gao guards against feeling total empathy, requiring his viewers to therefore be critical because “When the spectators’ feelings turn into empathy, the character as object is lost … and the audience is disempowered from analyzing clearly the social and political forces at work in the fictional world of that character.”41 From tripartition performance to tripartite film, Gao has been motivated to expand the expressivity of these two performative genres. I argue that he has moved away from characterization in the realist convention because such character types do not fit his agenda: his interest lies in creating a theater and film where the critical mind is constantly at work. This emphasis on conscious actors and a reflective audience is his critique of a subservient people who have not exercised their powers of criticism in the face of an oppressive national government and communist collective. His cinematic poetry, made for contemplation instead of popular cultural consumption, further challenges the hegemony of commercial globalization and anti-intellectual art, and calls for the revival of aesthetics and the independence of art.

From Theater to Cine-Poetry

213

Notes 1. This paper was inspired by the work I did with Jon Kowallis and Meg Mumford at the University of New South Wales and the late Don Fredericksen at Cornell University: without their mentorship, I would not have been introduced to the study of Gao Xingjian, theater and art film, and now this project. I am grateful to Shelby Chan at the Hang Seng Management College for providing me with a DVD copy of Requiem for Beauty, which was vital since the film is not commercially available. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Naomi Wieser at Bard College for her kind assistance with the French text in the film. 2. Throughout this essay, I have indicated the dates when Gao’s works were first completed. All translations into English are mine unless otherwise stated. 3. Henry Y.H. Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre: Gao Xingjian and Chinese Theatre Experimentalism (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2000), 185. 4. Mick Wallis and Simon Shepherd, Studying Plays (London: Arnold, 2002), 15. 5. Zou Jiping, “Gao Xingjian and Chinese Experimental Theater,” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994, 54. 6. Gao Xingjian, “Concerning Silhouette/Shadow,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), 184. 7. Gao Xingjian, “On Requiem for Beauty, and Discussing Cine-Poetry,” in Gao, Freedom and Literature (Taipei: Lianjing, 2014), 99. 8. Sy Ren Quah, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 25. 9. Gao Xingjian’s unique performance method has been denoted “tripartition of the actor” by Gilbert C.F. Fong; see “Introduction,” in The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1999, xviii); “triplication of the actor” and “triplication of the theatre” by Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, 50; “three identities of the actor” by Gilbert C.F. Fong, “Gao Xingjian and the Idea of the Theatre,” in Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian, ed. Kwok-kan Tam (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2001), 148; “tripartite of performance” by Quah, Gao Xingjian, 133; and “tripartite nature of performance” by Mabel Lee in “The Potential of The-

214

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

atre,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, 48. I use my own rendition, “tripartition of performance.” See Fong, “Introduction,” in Gao, The Other Shore; and “Gao Xingjian and the Idea of the Theatre,” in Tam, ed., Soul of Chaos; also Quah, Gao Xingjian, 130–162. Gao Xingjian, “Another Kind of Aesthetics,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, 100. Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, ed. Eugenio Barba (New York: Routledge, 2002), 214. Gao Xingjian, “Some Suggestions on Producing The Other Shore,” in Gao, The Other Shore, 43. Gao Xingjian, “Concerning Silhouette/Shadow,” in Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian, ed. Fiona Sze-Lorrain (Paris: Contours, 2007), 33; also reprinted in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation. Gao, “Concerning Silhouette/Shadow,” 22; also reprinted in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation. Gao Xingjian, “After the Flood,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, 222. Gao Xingjian, “Between Homeland and Heartland,” lecture presented at the University of Notre Dame, September 2007. See also Mabel Lee, “Contextualizing Gao Xingjian’s Film Silhouette/Shadow” (January 2008), MCLC Resource Center Newsletter http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/lee.htm. Gao Xingjian, “Requiem for Beauty,” in Gao, Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts: Collected Poems of Gao Xingjian (Taipei: Lianjing, 2012). Gao, “On Requiem for Beauty,” 111–112. Gao, “Another Kind of Aesthetics,” 94, 95. Gao, “Concerning Silhouette/Shadow,” 186. Ibid., 179. Gao, “On Requiem for Beauty,” 111. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 103. Gao, “After the Flood,” 223. Gao, “On Requiem for Beauty,” 103. Gao Xingjian, “Dramaturgical Method and the Neutral Actor,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, 166. Gao, “Concerning Silhouette/Shadow,” 183. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 81–82. W. B. Worthen, comp., The Harcourt Brace Anthology of Drama (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College, 2000), 725.

From Theater to Cine-Poetry

215

32. Gao Xingjian, “The Case for Literature,” trans. Mabel Lee, PMLA 116, no. 3 (May 2001): 598. 33. Wah Guan Lim, “On the Margins of East and West,” Hong Kong Drama Review 8 (September 2009): 173–174. 34. Liu Zaifu, On Gao Xingjian (Taipei: Lianjing, 2004), 17. 35. Noël Dutrait, “The Birth of an Opera in Chinese—Gao Xingjian’s Snow in August,” trans. Pan Xinghui, Mingbao yuekan 38, no. 66 (June 2003): 40. 36. Yang Yongmiao, “Artistic Circles Meditate on Snow in August: Gao Xingjian Challenges the Impossible,” Yuanjian zazhi 198 (2002): 171. 37. Gao Xingjian, “Literary Conversation between Julia Alvarez and Gao Xingjian.” Interviews conducted by Maria Rosa Olivera-Williams and Mabel Lee; English–Chinese translation by Jonathan Noble. “Between Homeland and Heartland,” lecture at University of Notre Dame, Indiana, September 10–13, 2007. 38. Gilbert C.F. Fong, “Freedom and Marginality: The Life and Art of Gao Xingjian,” in Cold Literature: Selected Works by Gao Xingjian, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong and Mabel Lee (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005), xx. 39. Fong, “Freedom and Marginality,” xl. 40. Ibid. 41. Margaret Eddershaw, Performing Brecht: Forty Years of British Performances (London: Routledge, 1996), 16.

Chapter 15

Inlaying Images and Seeing Poetry Gao Xingjian’s Cine-Poem Requiem for Beauty Yue Huanyu Gao Xingjian directed his art film Requiem for Beauty, released in 2013. Bearing the title of a poem he had written some years earlier,1 the film is a visual reinforcement of thinking he began to develop soon after relocating to France at the end of 1987. He became gravely concerned about how globalization, commercialization, and market forces dictate what constitutes art, and the impact this has on practicing artists as well as audiences. As an accomplished writer and artist, he adopted experimental methods in shooting this film that are unlike any of the conventional procedures used in independent filmmaking. In this study of Requiem for Beauty these methods are subjected to analysis to support my theory of the inherent structure of the film as a process of “inlaying images.” Proceeding from that point, I will illustrate that this process generates a visual effect of “seeing poetry.”

218

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Gao calls Requiem for Beauty a “cine-poem,” a relatively new art form without a complete story,2 yet the viewer will find that it is full of thoughtprovoking plots. The actors did not perform in real locations for many scenes because of budgetary constraints, so generally the backdrops and the acting were shot separately. The backdrops consist of footage taken during Gao’s travels over a period of several years, later computer edited during the production of the film. Magnificent shots of landscapes and cityscapes from all over the world are projected onto the stage backdrop, which constitutes the innermost layer of the filmed images. The performance takes place before a constantly changing background, which forms the second layer of images. The silver screen is the material carrier of the projections, and this constitutes the outermost layer or “shell” of images. In other words, Requiem for Beauty is a theatrical work, a “play” embedded in a shell of filmed footage. The images of the performance are inlaid in the backdrop of filmed footage, finally presented on the layer of the silver screen. This is how Requiem for Beauty is constituted through a process of “inlaying images.” Since the turn of the millennium, Gao Xingjian has tried to combine the methods and techniques of film and poetry to create nonparallel aesthetic experiences. In 2008, he shot a twenty-eight-minute film, After the Flood, in which he explores the film potential of synesthetic forms of art. His Requiem for Beauty is a masterpiece in this relatively new art form that combines features of both film and poetry. The philosophical thinking in the original poem is transformed in the film into narration, dialogue, and soliloquy, while the imagery in the poem is visualized on the screen and endowed with totally new flavors. “Seeing poetry” alludes to rhythms and rhymes in the poem being converted into montages, and to camera shots that make the cine-poem as smooth as flowing silk.

Janus and Trinity: The Structure of Gao’s Cine-Poem Requiem for Beauty is a feast for the eyes and a chronicle of art history retold. The footage Gao Xingjian has used of various museums is a

Inlaying Images and Seeing Poetry

219

tribute to André Malraux, the author of Les voix du silence (Voices of silence) and La métamorphose des dieux (Metamorphosis of the gods). The film itself becomes art history for the audience. As Malraux asserts, “A ‘museum without walls’ is coming into being, and … it will carry infinitely farther that revelation of the world of art, limited perforce, which the ‘real’ museums offer us within their walls.”3 As a “museum without walls,” Gao’s Requiem for Beauty brings artworks from different epochs and various cultural backgrounds into the shared imaginary space of all humanity. The purpose is to allow different artworks to interact and enable synchronous conversations and echoes among the artworks, performers, and audience. In many parts of the film the performers are seen walking through a fictional museum. Metaphorically, they are walking through world art history. By following their trail, the eyes of the audience are drawn to stone walls in the Louvre, pigeons flying over Campo San Polo in Venice, the Gates of Paradise Rising in Florence, etc. Like the Roman god Janus, Requiem for Beauty has two faces as a cine-poem: film images and the language of poetry, which complement each other. Visual performativity and theatricality unfold on the screen as the performance is viewed in film, while rhetoric and lyricism are manifested by the sound of poetry. Poem and film are inseparable, and as integral components of the work, are to be read intertextually. Joined together perfectly, poem and film illuminate each other: the poem is the motif or script of the image flow, while the performance is a visual supplement. Film is inherently devoid of philosophy; here it is precisely the philosophical content of the poem that is highly enriching,4 while simultaneously the images greatly enrich the visual experience. Although the two compositions can be read and watched independently,5 studying both as a single entity or a unified whole in fact provides a coherent philosophy with the title Requiem for Beauty. Gao summarizes the unique aesthetics of this work thus: “This is a ternary structure of paintings, sound effects and choreographed dance. Every shot in the film takes places in front of a painting. The montage sequences and the advance

220

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

or retreat of the camera, in fact all movements are incorporated into the images on the silver screen.”6 Gao argues that in some cases there is justification in the cine-poem for choreography—as one of the three basic elements—to be replaced by “language.”7 It is possible that Gao’s theory is inspired by the Aristotelian idea that different forms of art form an alliance as a primitive unity.8 The three elements behave like a trinity in constituting an organic whole, yet at the same time are relatively independent of one another. The cinepoem thus comes into being. However, in Gao’s cine-poem the functions of the three elements are disproportionate. Because the poem came into existence independently before the film, both the images and the music were subordinate to the language of the poem, working to guide the other two elements within the frame. If the function of language had been disabled in Requiem for Beauty, Gao’s philosophical thoughts would not have been accessible to the audience because images and sounds are effective for expressing feelings and emotions, rather than ideas. In a cine-poem, only the poem has the lead role among the components and lights the candle of philosophical thought in the darkness of the theater.

Inlaying Images: The Death and Rebirth of Real Beauty Projection, as a method of artistic installation, has a unique function: the inlaying of images. Gao Xingjian’s filming technique guides the audience to realize that they are seeing images inside images when observing the image projections as a background in the film. Because the film on the screen is a layer of vision made of intangible lights and illusions, this way of seeing is trying to touch another uncertain layer of phantoms inside the illusions. In this way, layers of images are constructed in Gao’s cine-poem.

Inlaying Images and Seeing Poetry

221

Despite the theme being Requiem for Beauty, the film does not avoid showing images of so-called contemporary beauty to criticize it: multiple layers of crass images force the audience to acknowledge the isolation of human beings and their estrangement from society. The film presents illusions of modern society but does not promote nihilism. The film also cannot be regarded as advocating eclecticism; instead it reveals an attitude of abandoning both the total nihilism and the optimism of modern society. There is no apparent dividing line in Gao’s philosophical world between nihilism and optimism, yet a third space emerges between the two. It is a space of freedom, an escape from the mundane world and an eternal new realm in which the heart and spirit can float, wander, and roam. This is a state of “no possessions” and “free wandering,” a neutral space for unloading the moral burdens of everyday life, resting the heart, and easing anxieties. The loss of beauty is announced in the prelude of the cine-poem, with a sense of sorrow and emptiness. A young messenger comes into a theater dressing room filled with performers on the point of going onstage. He tells them the news: “Beauty is dead, beauty is gone.” In the pervasive mood of shock and sadness, the performers vacate the room, leaving the young messenger standing alone with an expression of loss and incomprehension on his face.9 The feeling of loss and sorrow suffuses the cine-poem. Toward the end of the film, a scene suddenly cuts in. There are images of amplified ocean waves and a man standing with his back to the viewer: a small and solitary figure who seems to be swallowed by a giant wave. The giant wave reinforces that humanity is just such a group of insignificant creatures, and that their hopes will be washed away by the waves of time. A man is standing alone, in a barren world filled with the helplessness and bewilderment of humankind. This is an allegory for the human condition in contemporary society. Why does beauty wither? How is it corrupted and lost in modern society? One of the reasons is that a fast-pace lifestyle, overinflated desires, and economic prosperity contribute simultaneously to the breeding of

222

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

cheats, fraudsters, and thieves. Jean Baudrillard correctly asserts: “The other production, that of goods and commodities, that of la belle époque of political economy, no longer makes any sense of its own, and has not for some time.”10 The demand for rapid production of material goods for consumption leads to the loss of the real in society and to the loss of beauty in contemporary art. In this way, “The loss of beauty in contemporary art is also the loss of the human.”11 The performers wandering in the museum of art history are also walking on a land filled with the smell of death. Theodor Adorno pointed out that the word “museum” in German is a synonym for “tomb.” “Museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art.”12 In the inner space of a museum, history and beauty meet their death simultaneously. “Historicism entered aesthetics. … In this notion of art the word beauty was rendered obsolete … or else an ignorant idea held by viewers who were waiting to be educated in new art concepts.”13 Humanity is walking down the path of artistic evolution, which inevitably leads to the abandonment of beauty and art itself. Gao indicates that “The contemporary new does not concern itself with art techniques and artistic expression. What is more, ‘new’ is directed at art concepts. … Modernity has become precisely such an ossified principle and has turned art into a game of concepts.”14 As previously mentioned, Requiem for Beauty is a museum without walls, which compresses the art collections and aesthetic relics of the entire world into seconds-long glimpses on the screen. This is a grand farewell to the fading of classical beauty.

Seeing Poetry: Beyond the Limits of Words Film images as shots and montages can convey visual information that cannot be clearly expressed by words. So in Requiem for Beauty what had been heard through poetry by the audience can now also be seen through their eyes. Images created in the original poem transform and are reformatted in film. In this way, poetry is no longer treated as an

Inlaying Images and Seeing Poetry

223

artistic expression to be merely heard and read: audiences now see the poetry through filmed images. Charles Baudelaire once wrote to Arsène Houssaye: “Which of us has not, in his ambitious days, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and choppy enough to fit the soul’s lyrical movements, the undulations of reverie, the jolts of consciousness?”15 It would seem that Gao’s cine-poem is a realization of Baudelaire’s dream; he cast aside unnecessary poetic techniques, yet achieved harmony and beauty in this work. Requiem for Beauty directly penetrates the heart with dignity, softness, and much power. Baudelaire’s “undulations of reverie” are realized through Gao’s precise control of light and color: his management of color and image in the cine-poem is the crystallization of aesthetics. The nuanced colors at the conclusion are breathtaking and glamorous with the accompaniment of the music. After 115 minutes of the film, the screen has gone from color to black and white, and in the last two minutes the background changes to Gao’s ink-wash paintings, which focus on the representation of the earth and the sun. One painting, titled Eclipse, is of a white sun being eaten by the black sky; another, Weightlessness, shows the eaten sun struggling and flying up to the sky, in a white night.16 The ambiance thus becomes deathly solemn. Several performers in black robes are holding a ceremonial ritual and are crawling on the ground in postures of worship. At the very end of the cine-poem, at the site of beauty’s burial, with pain, remorse, and suffering, the hope of regaining beauty rises simultaneously with the theme music ending. Through Requiem for Beauty Gao informs the audience of the illusion and the pain of the loss of natural beauty. Yet at the same time, he is trying to bury beauty with his own hands. In this sense, Requiem for Beauty counts as a dual funeral: its illusory beauty conducts a requiem mass for real/natural beauty, yet the audience will realize that this requiem mass is also for the foregone death of illusory beauty itself. The climax of beauty’s

224

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

prosperity is a harbinger of its own death, and in the kaleidoscopic lens of illusory beauty we observe the possibilities of real beauty reborn. Like the phoenix, beauty will rise from its own ashes.

Gao Xingjian’s Awareness of Language In one of Gao’s most recent plays, The Man Who Questions Death (2004), This Man refers to a neurotic old man who, after finding himself mistakenly locked up in a modern art museum, begins to rant about art appreciation, human life, and the absurdity of contemporary art. Later, This Man begins a conversation with his sober inner self, That Man. They play a game of logic and reasoning, which gradually leads to a psychological breakdown of This Man, who finally commits suicide.17 With the benefit of hindsight, it can be regarded as a prequel to Requiem for Beauty containing sprouts of topics to be found in the cine-poem. Gao’s poetry is rather abstract and shies away from colorful images, but it succeeds in manifesting his unique philosophical reflections. As a cine-poem, Requiem for Beauty uses cinematography to compensate for the absence of images in the poem, which allows Gao to further weaken images in the narration and the voice-over, thus focusing on expressing his philosophy. Most of Gao’s poems sit ambiguously between literature and philosophy; his cine-poem Requiem for Beauty sits ambiguously between language and image. In his long poem Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts, Gao argues, “The poet only talks about / things that can be felt / things that cannot be felt / are left to philosophy.”18 In the same way of thinking, things that cannot be manifested by poetry are made visible by Gao in film. Requiem for Beauty begins from the Western artistic tradition and ends with Chinese traditional painting, and a cultural balance between West and East is achieved. Liu Zaifu has noted that Gao’s literature is suffused with an awareness of language.19 As Wittgenstein asserts in Tractatus, “There are indeed, things that cannot be put into words.

Inlaying Images and Seeing Poetry

225

They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”20 Gao’s attitude to language is like Wittgenstein’s: for what cannot be articulated in language, Gao resorts to other ways of expression. Music, image, and human language are integrated into an exquisite cine-poem with a ternary structure that awaits activation and appreciation by the audience.

226

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Notes 1. See Gao Xingjian, “On Requiem for Beauty, and Discussing Cine-Poetry,” in Gao, Freedom and Literature (Taipei: Lianjing, 2014). 2. Ibid., 101. 3. See André Malraux, “Museum without Walls,” in The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 16. 4. Film is not an ideal medium for expressing philosophical ideas. As George Bluestone says, “the film image, being externalized in space, cannot be similarly converted through the conceptual screen. … Or rather, the film, having only arrangements of space to work with, cannot render thought, for the moment thought is externalized it is no longer thought. … A film is not thought; it is perceived.” In other words, films are more suited to expressing feelings than thoughts. See George Bluestone, Novels into Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 47– 48. 5. The poem “Requiem for Beauty” was first published in Gao Xingjian’s poetry collection and is much longer than the script of the film. See Gao, Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts: Collected Poems of Gao Xingjian (Taipei: Lianjing, 2012), 139–199. 6. See Gao Xingjian and Fang Zixun, On Drama (Taipei: Lianjing, 2010), 149. 7. Ibid., 146. 8. “Poetry, music and dancing constitute in Aristotle a group by themselves, their common element being imitation by means of rhythm, rhythm which admits of being applied to words, sounds and the movements of the body. … Together they form a natural triad, and … We should perhaps say, the alliance of music and dancing under the supremacy of poetry—was exhibited even in the person of the artist.” See Aristotle, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Dover, 1951), 138–139. 9. In the film, from 0:00 to 1:40. 10. See Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation,” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 180. 11. See Gao Xingjian, “Another Kind of Aesthetics,” in Gao, Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), 99.

Inlaying Images and Seeing Poetry

227

12. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 175. “The German word, museal [museumlike], has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. … Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art.” 13. See Gao, “Another Kind of Aesthetics,” 99. 14. Ibid., 96. 15. “Preface to La Presse, 1862.” See Charles Baudelaire, The Parisian Prowler, trans. Edward K. Kaplan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 129. 16. These two paintings can also be found in Gao Xingjian, Another Kind of Aesthetics (Taipei: Lianjing, 2001), 151, 153. 17. See Gao Xingjian, Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2007), 75–108. 18. Poem 31 of “Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts,” in Gao, Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts, 129. 19. Liu Zaifu, On Gao Xingjian (Taipei: Lianjing, 2004), 162. 20. In Tractatus, Wittgenstein adds, “What we cannot speak about we pass over in silence.” See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 89.

Part IV

Identifying and Defining the Self

Chapter 16

Gao Xingjian: Autobiography, Auto-fiction, and Poetry Noël Dutrait

In a paper on Gao Xingjian’s novels and plays presented in January 2005, I attempted to give an overall analysis of his body of work by showing to what extent the literary, theatrical, and even pictorial productions of the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature were as much autobiography as they were auto-fictions.1 At the time Gao Xingjian had not produced films or verse (except for a few odd lines), but since then his three films Silhouette/Shadow (La silhouette sinon l’ombre; 2006), After the Flood (Après le déluge; 2008) and Requiem for Beauty (Le deuil de la beauté; 2013) have come into existence.2 His collection of poems titled Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts (Esprit errant et pensée méditative; 2012)

232

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

was published in Chinese in Taiwan, and in French in my translation in May 2016 under the Caractère à Paris imprint.3 When Gao Xingjian decided to write Soul Mountain4 during the 1980s in China, he had no hope of it being published, and this made it possible for him not to self-censure and to write “in every way true to nature,” using Rousseau’s formula, which heralded the birth of the “autobiographical literature” genre. Jean-Jacques wrote: “I have begun a work without precedent, and one which will have no imitators. I propose to set before my fellow men a man in every way true to nature; and that man shall be myself.”5 When Gao Xingjian was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, his literary work consisted mainly of two long novels, Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible6; ten plays, some of which were written directly in French; and a collection of short stories. The autobiographical aspect of the two novels is obvious and the interplay of the personal pronouns “I,” “you,” and “he” allowed the author to evoke from several angles the interior torment of the narrator in the face of events in China from the time of the Cultural Revolution up until the period of liberalization and the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. Arriving in Europe in late 1987, Gao Xingjian decided in the same year to settle in France. He says that Soul Mountain would probably have been much longer, but after the Tiananmen Massacre, he knew that his life had changed forever and decided to remain in France. He symbolically terminated his nostalgia for his native land by bringing the novel to an end with the words: “In reality I understand nothing, nothing at all. That’s how it is.”7 Yet in 1998, he returned to his past and wrote One Man’s Bible, which shows how a character designated successively as “you” and “he” lives through the history of China from 1940 to the present. An autobiography without being called one, One Man’s Bible is as much a book about the history of Communist China and the Cultural Revolution as about the internal torments of the main character, a man passionately devoted to the arts and letters of his country who is sent to be reeducated in

Autobiography, Auto-fiction, and Poetry

233

the country and who describes in minute detail the state of mind of men and women in the face of totalitarianism and political struggles. He demonstrates that everyone is at the same time a torturer and a victim and that it is impossible to live in a country run by a totalitarian government, both before and after the institution of reforms and the widening of the political spectrum. From the first page of One Man’s Bible, the autobiographical nature of the work is patently obvious. Gao writes: He has not forgotten that he had another life. The memory of an old yellowed photograph, remaining in his house after being spared by the flames, awakens a feeling of sadness in him, but it is too remote, as if that life had come to an end, as if it had disappeared forever. In his home in Beijing, which the police had sealed, there was still a group photograph of his family, left for him by his late father, the most complete photograph of his large family.8 And the first chapter evokes the early childhood of the author, how he staged plays under his mother’s guidance, and how as a sickly child he spent his time reading and writing his personal diary. Anyone who has read Gao Xingjian’s articles about his novels or heard him speak in interviews or in lectures about his career as a novelist will realize to what extent his two long novels are autobiographical. The long journeys the author made to the farthest reaches of China at the beginning of the 1980s lie at the very heart of Soul Mountain, in the same way as the evocation of the life of the main character in One Man’s Bible, designated by the pronouns “you” and “he,” shows clearly that Gao Xingjian, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, made the decision to speak about his own history and the events that he lived through, from his earliest childhood until his arrival in France. The richness of the author’s language and the ingenuity of his literary processes, of course, take these works far beyond the simple testimony of a man and his times. Until 2012, with the appearance in Taiwan of the collection of poems entitled Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts, Gao Xingjian was

234

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

not thought of as a poet but rather as a novelist, painter, playwright, and theater and film director. However, he has often explained to his friends that he would sometimes, on commission, write poems that were quite free in form and were published in journals or newspapers. He explains this in the postscript of his anthology.9 He indicates that, although until then he had not published poetry in the strict sense of the term, he considered that several of his works were in themselves poetic texts—for example, his play Weekend Quartet10 and Song of the Night (Ballade nocturne).11 In 1996, in its October number, the French journal Poésie 96 in Paris published a poem by Gao Xingjian with the curious title “I Say Hedgehog” (Je dis hérisson), dated 1991 and translated into French by Annie Curien. The translation was preceded with a presentation by the author and an interview with him. Gao Xingjian, who had left China seven years previously, expressed his attachment to France and French literature, citing the names of Prévert, Genet, Ponge, Michaux, and Ionesco. He declared: “I think that the poet must be like an echo chamber in which all the sounds in the world can be heard. My great dream is to write a poem in dramatic form in which the language processes would, as it were, be staged.” It is evident that at the time Gao Xingjian was not suggesting there was a possible autobiographical aspect to his poems. Almost twenty years later, he published a collection of poems in Chinese in Taiwan, accompanied by several of his ink paintings. These poems— ballads, short poems, and random thoughts—show that the author had succeeded in doing what he had dreamed of in 1996, using, for example, “Requiem for Beauty”12 as an argument in his film of the same name, and “Song of the Night” as a libretto for a dance performance. When one reads his anthology, Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts, it is obvious that some of his poems are in no way autobiographical. No trace is to be found of the author, nor any evocation of his deeds and actions, and even less reference to any form of reality. On the other hand, striking images, word play, assonances, and alliterations are

Autobiography, Auto-fiction, and Poetry

235

there. This is the case for the oldest poem, “I Say Hedgehog,” which is called by its author a “modern ballad,” as well as other poems grouped together under the title News Items (Brèves).13 However, in the poem “Revelation of a Dream” (Révélation d’un rêve) is a theme dear to Gao Xingjian: the double identity of the narrator. In this case the poet and the man Gao Xingjian are often evoked through use of the pronouns “I,” “you,” “he,” or “she,” as in Soul Mountain, One Man’s Bible, and Song of the Night. The poet writes: in a sudden dream you realize that you do not belong to this world the you who is in your dream is not tolerated by others it is only when you suspend your “self” that you feel relaxed and then, having become invisible as a wanderer, you pass into the world of humans or you stop to contemplate the spectacle of these beings who, in feverish motion, constantly change shape and the pleasure derived from this fills you with enthusiasm in this instant you realize what freedom is and human affairs Suddenly everything is clear.14 As in his novels, Gao Xingjian dissociates himself from the world in which he lives (he suspends his self), becomes “you,” and understands the nature of freedom that he sometimes calls the “great release.” His long poem entitled “L’errance de l’oiseau” (Wanderings of the bird),15 written directly in French in 2003 (dated 2009 in its Chinese version) as part of cultural events for the Gao Year in Marseille, can give the impression of being an autobiographical poem. Indeed, the poet is addressing here “you” who flies in the air like a bird. This handling of pronouns by Gao Xingjian in his novel Soul Mountain has clearly demonstrated that the

236

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

“I” and the “you” are one and the same person confronted with reality. This recalls chapter 52 of Soul Mountain: “In this long monologue, ‘you’ is the object of my story, indeed it is a self who listens attentively to me, ‘you’ is merely a shadow of me.”16 It is evident that if “you” is another “I,” the poems of Gao Xingjian become in some cases autobiographical also. In “Wanderings of the Bird” we encounter the constant obsession of the poet who desires to be free of all his burdens to rediscover, as he says, his “freedom in wandering”: if you are a bird just a bird when the wind rises you fly away opening wide your large round eyes you gaze in the dark upon this wretched world here below beyond the morass of vexations flying at night, without a precise goal listening to the whistling of the air, your beating heart what release there is in wandering!17 The libretto for the dance performance entitled “Song of the Night” occupies a special place in Gao Xingjian’s poetic production. In fact, it is a text written in French and subsequently translated by the author himself into Chinese. As far as I can tell, it has no autobiographical focus but constitutes, rather, a kind of panegyric on femininity, a call for respect for women and a wry observation concerning the difficulty of loving: She: May release prevail over violence. May seduction replace aggression. Then the world will be a much better place. Let enchanting women lay claim to a kingdom Radiating self-fulfillment; although this war is destined to fail and this union doomed to mutual betrayal, we are nevertheless not lacking in audacity

Autobiography, Auto-fiction, and Poetry

237

in the fanfare of the final triumph!18 In the final event, the two longest poems in the collection seem to correspond most closely to autobiographical expression. The first, “Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts,”19 was written in 2010, three years after “Song of the Night” and seven years after “Wanderings of the Bird.” It may perhaps be remembered that the author fell seriously ill during the Gao Year in Marseille. This episode of his life is also clearly manifested in the film Silhouette/Shadow, in which Gao Xingjian plays the part of a character with the same name, while the organization of the Gao Year in Marseille and the different events that took place form the backdrop. Between 2003 and 2008, Gao Xingjian slowed down his work rhythm and other activities and at the same time refused the numerous invitations coming from all over the world. Thanks to the excellent medical attention he received in Paris and to his radical change in lifestyle, he has succeeded in establishing a creative life that focuses on poetry and the visual arts of film and painting. The first verse of his long poem “Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts” begins with these words: life for you has become so new again and still in this world you give free rein to your passions you begin again to be involved in wide-ranging activity what great good fortune!20 This “wide-ranging activity” does indeed correspond to the life of the author. From 2004 onward he has been regularly exhibiting his paintings in the Claude Bernard Gallery in Paris and abroad: in Spain, Germany, Singapore, Switzerland, the United States, Belgium, Portugal, Luxembourg, Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong, as well as in personal and collective exhibitions.21 This activity shows that Gao Xingjian’s health is no longer fragile, since he travels the world by plane and in his personal studio in Paris he paints large canvases that are often difficult

238

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

to transport. In the poem, the author goes so far as to represent God and the Devil pontificating on his fate, even though Gao Xingjian himself has often repeated that he has no religion. He nevertheless writes: Death was to have taken charge of you But God said “wait a minute!” let him have a little more time this little brat still has things to say why not let him finish?22 The character of Death also appears in the film Silhouette/Shadow. A figure dressed in black approaches the main character (played by Gao Xingjian himself) then slowly moves away. The message is thus clear. After a few difficult years and a confrontation with death, whom he personifies in one of his films, the poet still has “things to say.” Often pestered by French journalists about numerous events such as the organization of the Beijing Olympics and the violation of human rights in China, Gao Xingjian mostly refuses to comment to avoid futile arguments. However, whenever he has been questioned about the political situation in his former country, Gao, now a French national, declares that the present regime has in no way changed in nature and that he remains pessimistic about its future. The first two verses of the poem thus clearly indicate the state of mind of the poet, who is determined to continue expressing himself thanks to the charitable intervention of a God who asks Death to allow him to accomplish his task. However, he is not sure, he says, that he will “survive the winter.” Next, the poet says what he hopes to accomplish, once he leaves behind the quagmire in which he finds himself: There is no impediment to re-creating lightness of being a garden of Eden in your heart in which you can give free rein to your carefree nature

Autobiography, Auto-fiction, and Poetry

239

tasting pleasure to the full.23 Here we find the three ideas the poet holds most dear: lightheartedness, a carefree attitude, and pleasure. He then gives a kind of definition of the poetry that he is in the process of writing: It is essential to know that speaking to oneself is the aim of language and that roving thoughts are the very essence of poetry24 In Soul Mountain, Gao Xingjian had already made lavish use of soliloquy to express his feelings, impressions, and sensations, sometimes even recording his words on tape before writing them down. Thus, one finds passages of dazzling beauty in Soul Mountain.25 A reference to the last chapter of Soul Mountain is evident when the poet declares: since God has become a frog he does not look so cruel.26 In the last chapter of Soul Mountain Gao Xingjian writes: “Through the window, on the snow-covered ground I can see a small frog. It winks one eye and opens wide the other. It watches me without moving. I understand that it is God.”27 Next the poet states forcefully to what extent human beings can be bad, ugly, and mad as well as liars. In the face of such vileness, he prefers to ally himself with the Devil. In this vein, the poet declares: time and time again you have sought the meaning of life and it is only now at this moment that you understand the immediacy of the beautiful.28

240

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Here we encounter one of the facets of Gao Xingjian: his activity as a painter, which has led him to seek a new aesthetic, totally opposed to modernist and postmodernist conceptual art. Further on, the poet demonstrates how he lives alone, without constraints and in total freedom: You are a wanderer Without attachments You have neither parents nor children No country of birth No so-called fatherland And you travel thus through this universe.29 Finally, the poet begins a dialogue between “you” and “I.” “You” is free and full of lightness, whereas “I” remains a prisoner in the morass in which human beings flounder. This is certainly the case with the poet Gao Xingjian, aged in his seventies, who has no illusions concerning the approach of death, to which he has already come close many times, as he also recounts in chapter 12 of Soul Mountain after being wrongly diagnosed with cancer. No rancor Such lightness At the age of seventy you are still standing More or less stable Recovering what little life remains to you Truly You will not succeed in preventing death You have come close to it several times Playing, you have delayed its arrival.30 The poem “Requiem for Beauty” was originally destined to serve as a backdrop for the making of a film. In fact, in the footage, snatches of the text in French and English can be heard. I translated the first edition of the long poem from the Chinese in collaboration with the author, and it was published in a limited edition by Galerie Cimoncini

Autobiography, Auto-fiction, and Poetry

241

in Luxembourg for their large exhibition.31 In the long poem, which is a genuine appeal for a renaissance of beauty, Gao Xingjian returns to his favorite theme: beauty has been replaced by kitsch and bad taste, which pervades everything. The first verse is explicit: Do you know? Beauty has disappeared! What? What are you saying? Do you know that beauty is dead? What? What are you saying? Do you know that beauty is annihilated? That’s impossible! That’s how it is! Beauty is dead and buried!32 A simple description of the world follows: And all is now political noise and carryings on Disputes between political parties, electoral campaigns News of celebrities, all that there is, floods the world Vulgarity competes with kitsch In the face of this catastrophic situation, the poet speaks to himself in the second person: The street is full of busy passersby You feel so alone You draw nearer to observe them Face after face They all look without seeing Listen without hearing The shaky outline of the poet is present in his poem, just as it is in his paintings: Everything has become commercial publicity Even if you call out Only the gesture will remain

242

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics And you who have lost your soul This “you” who is nothing but a shaky outline Seeks in vain a world of lost dreams

Further on, the poet imagines himself as Jesus before his apostles, about to call for the return of beauty: The poet, with a poem in his hand, Recites to twelve men at the same table They do not stop sneering Incapable of repressing his anguish The poet puts down his paper Then everyone bursts out laughing Beside himself, the poet asks: Who has buried beauty? Immediately a great hubbub Black ink spreads on the table So finishes the solemn supper33 The conclusion of the poem is highly pessimistic. Beauty is dead; there is no longer any hope. Although this long poem is a vibrant appeal to salvage urgently disappearing beauty, its autobiographical aspect is less present than in the other poems. However, the ideas of Gao Xingjian, expressed in his novels as well as his plays and films, are again expressed here with artists, writers, and even politicians in mind. Through his diverse works, the lonely, fragile, and deeply pessimistic man makes a last appeal for a new renaissance in the arts and letters.34 Translated from the French by Margaret Sankey

Autobiography, Auto-fiction, and Poetry

243

Notes 1. See Noël Dutrait, “L’œuvre de Gao Xingjian: un essai d’analyse global,” in L’écriture romanesque et théâtrale de Gao Xingjian, edited by Dutrait (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 71–82. 2. These three films are not distributed commercially. In general, they are shown at cultural events concerning Gao Xingjian and his work. 3. Gao Xingjian, Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts (Taipei: Lianjing, 2012), 254; Gao Xingjian, Esprit errant pensée méditative, trans. Noël Dutrait (Paris: Caractères, 2016). 4. Gao Xingjian, La Montagne de l’âme, trans. Noël Dutrait and Liliane Dutrait (Paris: Point, 2007), 670. 5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les confessions, livre 1, 1782. 6. Gao Xingjian, Le livre d’un homme seul, trans. Noël Dutrait and Liliane Dutrait (Paris: Point, 2008). 7. Gao, La Montagne de l’âme, 670. 8. Gao, Le livre d’un homme seul, 11. 9. See Gao, Esprit errant pensée méditative, 167. 10. Gao Xingjian, Quatre quatuors pour un week-end (Belgium, CarnièresMorlanwelz: Lansman, 1999). 11. Gao, Esprit errant pensée méditative, 33–56. 12. Ibid., 103–138. 13. Ibid., 139–154. 14. Ibid., 150. 15. Ibid., 21–31. 16. Gao, La Montagne de l’âme, 421. 17. Gao, Esprit errant pensée méditative, 21. 18. Ibid., 51. 19. Ibid., 59–101. 20. Ibid., 63. 21. For the complete list of his activities, see Daniel Bergez and Gao Xingjian, Gao Xingjian: peintre de l’âme (Paris: Seuil, 2013), 260–261. 22. Gao, Esprit errant pensée méditative, 63. 23. Ibid., 71. 24. Ibid., 72. 25. See, for example, in chapter 77 of Soul Mountain. 26. Gao, Esprit errant pensée méditative, 73.

244 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Gao, La Montagne de l’âme, 669. Gao, Esprit errant pensée méditative, 81. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 100. Gao Xingjian, Le deuil de la beauté, trans. Noël Dutrait (Luxembourg: Galerie Simoncini Editeur, 2012), republished in Gao, Esprit errant pensée méditative, 103–137. 32. Gao, Esprit errant pensée méditative, 107. 33. Ibid., 124. 34. On this subject, see Gao Xingjian, L’Art d’un homme libre, in “Appel pour une renaissance des arts et des lettres,” trans. Noël Dutrait (Paris: éditions du Seuil), 62–74.

Chapter 17

Working Through Trauma in Gao Xingjian’s One Man’s Bible Janet Shum

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Goethe used images taken from trade and commerce to describe world literature as intellectual barter, a traffic in ideas between peoples, a literary market for exchanges of national intellectual treasures.1 But after the catastrophe of the world wars, intellectual barter could no longer be carried out in a promising or optimistic mood. Theodor W. Adorno writes in Minima Moralia that the idea that after this war life will continue “normally” … as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation is idiotic. … The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.

246

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption … perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world … as indigent and distorted.2

The traumatic decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) finally ended,3 and Yang Xiaobin called the post–Cultural Revolution literature of the avant-garde writers postmodern, because the works were considered a negation and deconstruction of the “modernity” of the Mao regime with its promise of a prosperous future that instead had a disastrous outcome. Like the Holocaust, the catastrophe shattered subjective integrity through historical violence, with destruction not only in physical victimization but also in psychic traumatization. For writers who had experienced the Cultural Revolution, trauma was manifested as the “deferred action of repressed memory” that they sought to illuminate through endless verbal games, to satisfy their irrepressible desire for expression. The “discursivity” of historical violence that intensifies the traumatic experience cannot be easily worked out in a rational and comprehensible way but must be “worked through,” usually by way of detours and distorted processes.4 Through the narratorial voice of One Man’s Bible,5 Gao Xingjian refers to the novel as a book of escape. It is about an exiled writer’s flight from home, with a recounting of the past self’s flight from the political purges of the Cultural Revolution. But it is also about return, as Antony Tatlow has pointed out: the self must return to the past to sort out the forces that shaped his relation to the country so that he can survive and move on with life. The engagement in politics of “he” of those times is not presented to judge the wrongs perpetrated by others; instead the novel depicts “he” as victim, but the story is first and foremost a clear indictment of his complicity, playing the role of an accomplice, in the history of the Cultural Revolution.6 To return in order to move ahead is symptomatic of trauma survivors who seek to heal. In this regard, One Man’s Bible may be viewed as a narrative act resembling the speech act of a trauma survivor whose repetitive acting out of the past through

One Man’s Bible

247

speech is part of a healing process. The shock of traumatic events that entail cognitive and emotional crises damages and hampers relationships both with oneself and with others. Piecing together the self requires a working through to gain a critical distance that allows distinguishing between past, present, and future.7

The Working Through In One Man’s Bible, “he” has poor sociopolitical insights and cannot see himself clearly during that moment of history. This is only possible in a deferred historical moment, i.e., when the world traveler-cum-exiled writer “you” looks back to those times, to put “he” under scrutiny. In the working-through process, the omniscient narrator uses free indirect thought or authorial intrusion to supplement the psychology of “he.” Hence “he” is given a retrospective vantage point to discover the truth about the Maoist regime. His response to Mao’s call to comment on the nation’s affairs was registered as a “political error” in his personal dossier. With narratorial intervention, “he” is described as sensing his precarious situation: a political storm was raging, and to survive he had to lose himself among the common people. He had to say what everyone else was saying and show that he was the same as everyone else.8 The survival instinct of “he” was awakened: one must wear a mask and become a performer. In a similar event at college “he” had made a politically incorrect statement and learned that lying was essential. At that point, the narrator intervenes and foregrounds the deferred moment of realization that “it was fundamentally impossible for a person to be pure, but it was only many years later that he was able to comprehend this … only after having personally verified the experiences of others and suffering as a consequence.”9 The foregrounding of the narratorial intervention demonstrates, through the experience of “he,” who is an everyman “he,” the situation of a social being succumbing to political, ideological, and hegemonic discourse, and illustrates an exemplary prototype of the intimate rela-

248

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

tionship between discourse and institutional power.10 The entanglement of “he” in the Red Guard purges implicitly echoes Foucault’s proposition that, rather than being something that one group possesses or uses over individuals, power is a network of relations that encompasses the rulers as well as those they rule in a vast web of discrete and local conflicts. Hence there is no outside of power, no disengaged point from which power is exercised or even studied without the implication that the subject could escape. Discussion of the narrator’s working-through process is given an added dimension by Wei Lingdun’s criticism. Wei rejects the Nobel Committee’s appraisal that the writer shows “ruthless candor” in recounting the Cultural Revolution and challenges Gao as a writer for not repenting of his own complicity in the political purges. For him, Gao’s use of “he” as an observer is a “disturbing” ethical issue that needs to be answered. The textual inference of Wei’s “crisis of witness” is the lack of description or “silence” on the engagement of “he” in the actual physical violence of gang fights as a Red Guard.11 Wei judges One Man’s Bible as falling into the common trap of triviality of Red Guard memoirs about the Cultural Revolution: the perpetrators of the purges easily redeem their guilt and gain freedom by pointing to the crimes of the Gang of Four and Chairman Mao. Wei regards the ellipses in narrative and abrupt shifts of “he” from perpetrator to witness of others’ violence as evasive, alleging that the strategy excludes the narrator from acts of violence to gain reader sympathy for the Red Guards as victims of history. The problematic of Wei’s criticism has much to do with his reducing the novel to the literary mode of Red Guard confession and interpreting without reservation “he” as mimetic biographical replica of young Gao entangled in the chaotic historical past.12 While the aesthetics and ethics of a narrative alluding to an autobiographical mode is an important issue to address, the main concern here is Wei’s charge against the possibility of redemption and his skepticism about the ethic of distanciation in the case of One Man’s Bible.

One Man’s Bible

249

The Talking Cure In “Regarding the Pain of Others,” Susan Sontag defends Sebastiao Salgado’s photos against the criticism of aesthetic distanciation in portraying the misery of war and the migratory diaspora; critics maintained that Salgado focused excessively on the medium itself, rather than on the sobering subject. Sontag points out that the question is not about watching suffering from up close or a short distance, but the mediation of an image in sight that describes the function of the mind itself, a thinking act that requires distance. To quote her, “nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”13 The intriguing aspect of Gao’s distanciation is that, different from a photographer who is an outsider to the atrocity, the speaking subject is thinking through his own split self. A therapeutic process is simultaneously taking place in the speech act through the portrayal of “he” as an object in the narrative. Frederic Jameson, in his analysis of the Brechtian method of using the third person, points out that there is a metaphysical flight when names are stripped from things and events, allowing some primal nameless flux to be glimpsed underneath. Jameson likens the effect of third-person narrative to Freud’s “talking cure,” which is itself such a narrative “in which the patient’s story gradually returned upon its protagonist to throw all the latter’s notions of self into a new light.”14 In One Man’s Bible, the narrator psychoanalyzes “he”: “the reason he went crazy at that time was probably because the illusions he believed in had been shattered, and the imaginary world of books had become taboo. Also he was young, had had nowhere to dissipate his energy, and couldn’t find a woman for his body and soul. Sexually frustrated, he simply stirred the water in mud puddles.”15 On the emotive level, the talking cure re-creates a bodily sensation that the physical event calls for. There is the need to overcome the inability to feel one’s former emotions as the aftermath of trauma; it leaves the survivor not only numbed but also often without the motivation to carry out the task of reconstructing an ongoing narrative. It requires a listener,

250

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

an empathetic other, or a community of listeners for the subject to reexternalize the traumatic event in a transference process and remake the self. In this regard, the overwhelming figure of Margarethe, whom the exile writer once met in Beijing and re-encounters in Hong Kong, created early in the novel is significant. She serves as an agent to ignite the mnemonic power of “you” of the present in the talking out of the process. Although Margarethe’s identity as a Jewish woman is prominent, she is described as a hybrid, with a Jewish mother and German father. That Margarethe is a cosmopolitan individual who was born in Venice, speaks Chinese, French, German, and English, and works in Frankfurt is suggestive of a “transcultural” figure upon whom the acting out of trauma is posited in a dialogic relationship. Margarethe is the transitory lover of the playwright “you” who encourages him to talk about his past, but at the symbolic level she is also a libidinal figure signifying the difficult and painful process of the writer’s speech act of remembering. The transference process through the speech act of recounting the traumatic experience develops in parallel with the increasingly heightened sexual acts between present-day “you” and Margarethe. Margarethe is no ordinary listener encouraging “you” to speak about the past: she embodies the shame of the Nazi past and the desire to recuperate Jewish history. Though she did not live through the Holocaust, she does not lack a painful past. She was raped in her teens and later prostituted her body for a living. Following an exchange of roles, “you” becomes Margarethe’s listener. The sharing of the painful past becomes a mutual exchange, and the libidinal relationship between the two develops into a finale of sadomasochistic libidinal torture performed by the two traumatized bodies that are in fact one.16 Long after Margarethe has departed, the narrator notes that the libidinal desire to make love is contiguous with the sadomasochistic desire to write: “He had already formed the habit of transforming his feelings into language … the joy it brought him was like groaning or calling out when making love.”17 In a scene describing “you” being caressed by a motherly figure, the narrator says, “you equated this with love … sex … sadness … unsettling lust … language. The need

One Man’s Bible

251

to express and narrate is a form of joy in pouring out … it … totally cleanses you.”18 The healing process effected by the speech act is like a performance on stage: You need a stark, white stage with bright lights, so that he and a woman, both naked, can roll about as everyone looks on. … It’s just a theater to show suffering, joy, grief, and lust. And then … you quietly slip off with a young woman … you make love standing up in the lavatory. … Then you noisily flush the toilet. You want to flush yourself like this, to cleanse yourself, so that the world will weep … and you, by the window, mourn his loss of his self.19 The writer describes the mourning of his traumatic experience in the past political turmoil as an old man with a sunken mouth mounting an old picture frame on the stage with a plastic leg signed “WHAT,” just as if he were raising a national flag. But will the world weep with the writer mourning his loss of self on a world stage if he puts on a sadomasochistic act?

The Melancholic Clown Postmodernism has developed in the wake of the Shoah, and in Representing the Holocaust Dominick LaCapra observes that the specificity of traumatic happening is either avoided, encrypted, or echoed in traumatized, melancholic, manically ludic, opaque, and at times mournfully elegiac discourse, or entangled in an aporia of strong internal self-contestation in a text or an argument.20 LaCapra’s observation sheds light on the “postmodern” edge of Gao’s trauma narrative, which is engulfed in an aporia of antithesis and a dialectic of melancholy in need of unraveling. While the creation of an aesthetic distance between the temporality of “you” of today and “he” of the past makes possible the self-questioning of the reflective self, the aporia is that the writer is trapped in a double role, somewhat like a historian wanting to represent objectively a crippled history and at the same time entering the psyche of the masked “he” of

252

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

the past to bid him farewell. Different from Salgado’s photo on world misery, the miserable object under gaze in the frame is none other than the person framing the photo. Like a photographer, the narrator reveals that focusing the lens on “he” is an act of self-love, self-pity: it is a masturbatory and masochistic act, symbolized by the figurative libidinal love relationship between the present-day “you” and Margarethe. The act of describing the traumatic pain becomes a pain of description. The melancholia of narrating the past at the beginning of the novel develops into the melancholia of a frustrated writer who is lured into the act of writing about hell but senses how impossible it is. In revisiting that “immature man, that daydreaming survivor, that arrogant fellow, and the scoundrel who gradually became crafty,” the narrator says he refrains from either judging “he” or regarding him as a victim, and so avoids the fervor and suffering that are destructive to art and instead makes way for observation and investigation.21 However, the self-conscious narrator immediately engages himself in a self-reflective dialogue about the meaning of writing this work. On the one hand, he avows that to write is to remind people of “a sort of life more terrifying than … imaginary hell has existed and might make a comeback.” On the other hand, he questions the need to teach a moral lesson and the impossibility of taking a neutral stance with an “eye driven by all sorts of desires … while claiming to look with indifference upon the world.”22 For Freud, the flux of a “talking cure” is not simply about narrative recollection, but a mimetic reenactment as if it were present and real. Freud even uses the term “catharsis” to describe the nature of the talking cure as an “imitation of an action.”23 Given Gao’s antinarrative and subversive aesthetic stance against realism, the aporia of One Man’s Bible cannot only be attributed to the double role of the writer as historian-cumsurvivor: it is also an aesthetic issue. The author, experimental as he is, refuses the therapeutic effect of the traditional catharsis of a tragic hero seeking purification24 and pertains to a mode of self-parody with the clowning self as object. The narrator describes “you” as a naked self

One Man’s Bible

253

who, while crawling toward an open door, is suddenly exposed under a light and acts somewhat like a sad clown: You want to weep and wail in front of everyone, but don’t make a sound. People won’t know what you are weeping about, won’t know whether you are really weeping or whether you are acting, but you want to have a good cry in front of this playacting world. Not making a sound, of course, you mime that you are weeping, and get the honorable members of the audience to look on helplessly. Next, you rip open your shirt and take out a plastic red heart.25 The despondence of the sad clown is not without reason, and it is not simply because of the “tragic” past of the actor “he” under the mask. It is worrying to flesh out one’s guts for purification via a literary process that is not easily understood, especially when the literary artifact does not follow a conventional tragic mode. The jouissance of the narcissistic act of absurd clowning provides no purification for the spectator, perhaps only despair. The narrator incessantly says “you” do not understand, the “you” implicitly directed to the reader of the text. After the flogging in a sadomasochistic sex scene in a hotel room that ends up with Margarethe and “you” both crying, Margarethe, as one who was raped in her teens, talks about the impossibility of “you” understanding her pain. She says that all “you” enjoy is the pleasure of sex, implicitly pointing to the reader as voyeur of the libidinal performance.26 As if echoing Sontag’s comment on the spectators’ preference for the spectacle of bloody scenes, the narrator grumbles about the lack of listeners wanting to hear about others’ sufferings. Most would prefer the excitement of Hollywood films.27 The author, stubborn artist that he is, avows that freedom of expression takes no account of others’ approval or appreciation.28 He goes further, foregrounding that literature is a lie, an unequivocal reminder to readers of the aporia of representation trapped between the aesthetic demands of “creative” writing and the requirement of mimetic enactment that necessitates the recounting of a traumatic history.29 The narrator alludes to “melancholia” as the only reality.

254

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud argues that mourning, as the working through of loss, results in the subject’s ability to overcome the lost person, object, or thing. But the melancholic refuses to acknowledge the loss and keeps the lost object psychically alive by introjecting it into the ego. In The Ego and the Id, Freud further argues that a superego is created by such an introjection, whereby the internalized object judges the self critically. Heightened self-criticism characterizes the melancholic, which distinguishes melancholia from mourning.30 The impasse of the exiled writer’s melancholia, which renders mourning impossible, is that the irreversible “contaminated self” is after all a part of the self that cannot be eradicated. The narrator can talk back to Mao through the narrative act at the cognitive level, but the farewell to the past self is, at its best, a caesura. Espousing a playful melancholy between false and real in chapter 57, “you,” with the sadness of a jazz blues singer, visualizes a scene of the past appearing before him in a dreamlike instant. Sun Huirong, a student of the village school where “he” taught during the Cultural Revolution, once visited “he” in his lodgings but was driven away to avoid scandal. In the reminiscence, one later learns that Sun had been raped in a tamped-earth building and no one could save her. At this point “you” seems to realize that Sun may have wanted to confide in him that she had agreed to the rape in exchange for some merit points to reduce her daily hardships. The counterpoint of present and past, in an unexpected upsurge of an image of a girl being raped in a village house of disjunctive temporality, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, is a moment of constellation in which melancholy gives effect to historical–allegorical insight.31 The feeling of closeness with the Sun of the past that makes “you” want to “make love” with her bespeaks the experience-ruin of the escape narrative, a survival instinct that calls for a tradeoff of a self. Such an affective discovery located within experience-ruin has both personal and collective implications. This brief instant within a few lines in the chapter contains a historico-political insight that brings with it a jolting sense of emotional investment in the possibility of transformation. Benjamin argues that the redemptive

One Man’s Bible

255

image is bound up with an “image of happiness … found on the very despair and desolation.” Such a redemptive image shows us the nature and source of our oppression and the past wrong and shows us where to strike. If Goethe’s notion of world literature two centuries ago was about exchanges of national intellectual treasures, it could be viewed in a new light, as exemplified in Gao’s work, as an exchange of cultural collections of loss and experience-ruins in the instant of an image of constellation where the past and present meet.32

Redeemed or Not Redeemed While “you” seems to have redeemed the past through talking about it and enjoys a transcendental existence roaming France, New York, Barcelona, etc., the title of the book, One Man’s Bible, suggests at best an ironic redemption. LaCapra points out that in postmodern trauma, narrative excess is used to counter the excess of traumatic history as a homeopathic response.33 Gao’s narrative excess is not the least collaborative of a grand narrative like a biblical story involving a paradise, fall, history, and redemption structure, in which there will be illumination and redemption despite the most immense catastrophe. The ideology taught in Maospeak resembles to a certain extent the grand narrative of the Bible, with its promise of utopia and confession being the way of redemption for sin. While the author unequivocally condemns the self for having prostituted his physical self to survive, the narrator repeatedly says through “you” to Margarethe that he does not repent. The narrator’s self-contestation and claim not to repent could be understood in the sense that repentance by “you,” whether for oneself or for the collective, would make the subject resemble Christ to serve as a scapegoat to redeem mortal sin. Gao’s harsh criticism of playing god and acting as a savior repeatedly resonates in his works. Although One Man’s Bible ends on a conciliatory note, a dystopian paranoia lingers in Gao’s plays. Intertextual readings of Gao’s works are required to avoid misreading. Around the time One Man’s Bible was

256

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

published, in his play Nocturnal Wanderer the exiled writer who roams Hong Kong “as if in a dream, walking one foot heavy and one light”34 reappears on the stage performing the nightmarish act of an innocent man being trapped in crime, seduced by a prostitute who tempts his soul. The play ends with an outcry as the sleepwalker struggles with a shadowy man offstage. In terms of the logic of melancholy and mourning in Freud’s psychoanalysis, mourning is impossible because the “shadow” of affective melancholy blocks true mourning, and this renders total cure impossible. The huge body of the melancholic Margarethe blocking the hotel window overshadowing “you” in One Man’s Bible lingers, albeit as an affirmative energizing force that incites creativity, connecting the melancholic history of one’s man world to the traumatic of the globe. While Adorno advocates a postmodern “cultural turn” valorizing a discourse of trauma and an aesthetic of the strange and uncanny through self-estrangement, the problematic of commensurability in the world of traumatic exchange remains an issue. Sontag mentions that the Sarajevans were offended by Salgado’s inclusion, among theirs, of pictures of the Somalian suffering in a local exhibition that they considered unique, believing the groups of photos could not be compared.35 It would not be too far-fetched to say that it is also a question raised by Gao. Near the end of One Man’s Bible, the narrator interpolates the finale of his recounting of the past with scenes of liaisons with some female personae to spell out pain and traumatic experiences specific to the individuals, irrespective of cultural and sexual differences. Sylvie, a hedonistic yet melancholic French woman with multicultural lovers, is not interested in listening to “you” recount his past. In turn, it is “you” who listens to the women’s stories. Sylvie’s melancholy engulfs her in the narcissistic entanglement of pleasure and pain in love and sex that is grossly different from the case of Margarethe. Yet Sylvie’s melancholy is equally deep and infectious, and can’t be cured. Like her friend Martina, the sensuous and mature French woman with a sad weariness who ends up committing suicide, her pain is incommensurable.

One Man’s Bible

257

There might be no cure for melancholia, but we can at least be good listeners. Yet to listen is difficult. In the film Eighty-First Blow is a scene that portrays an audience (the Israeli public) giving another blow on top of the eighty blows (which a survivor testified that he received from the Nazis), saying that the survivor’s narrative can’t be true. As a psychoanalyst points out, the “crisis of witness” is not only of the survivor but includes the listener.36 Gao’s postmodernist traumatic discourse in One Man’s Bible, with its self-contestation and ambivalence, poses no less a challenge to his readers and critics, who may be susceptible to their own crises of witness, as exemplified in Wei’s query about the truthfulness of the writer and the ethic of distanciation in One Man’s Bible that he found unsettling.

258

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Notes 1. Fritz Strich, Goethe and World Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), 5. 2. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 55, 247. David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer, eds., Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Émigré Intellectuals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 157–168. 3. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to remove bourgeois and “revisionists” through violent class struggle. Millions were persecuted and suffered arbitrary imprisonment and torture; thousands committed suicide. Guo Jian points out that neo-Marxists like Althusser uphold Mao’s Cultural Revolution to verify their theory on ideological interpellation but fail to address the disastrous social damage it caused. Song Yongyi, ed., The Cultural Revolution: Historical Truth and Collective Memories (Hong Kong: Tianyuan shuwu, 2007), 88–89. 4. Yang Xiaobin, The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 47–50, 230. 5. Gao Xingjian, One Man’s Bible, trans. Mabel Lee (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). 6. Antony Tatlow, “The Silence of Buddha: Triangulating Gao Xingjian, Brecht, and Beckett,” in Polyphony Embodied: Freedom and Fate in Gao Xingjian’s Writings, ed. Michael Lackner and Nikola Chardonnens (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), 62. Tatlow considers that the splitting of the personality between the present “you” and the past “he” is a representational demand and therapeutic necessity to address ego as an existential and philosophical problem. 7. Susan Brison, “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self,” in Acts of Memory, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 40–48. 8. Gao, One Man’s Bible, 55. 9. Ibid., 142. 10. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1990). Wang Keming and Song Xiaoming, eds., We Confess (Hong Kong: Great Mountain Culture, 2014) was published to commemorate the Cultural Revolution. The reminiscences of this older generation reveal that many

One Man’s Bible

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

259

were enmeshed in the political turmoil as both perpetrator and victim. In the late 1990s Gao Xingjian was at the forefront in bringing out in his One Man’s Bible the critical issue of repenting or not. Wei Lingdun, One Gives Birth to Two, Two Gives Birth to Three: Research on Gao Xingjian’s Fiction (Hong Kong: Cosmos, 2013), 221, 222, 228. Gao is always self-contradictory, at least on the textual level. While the writer weaves into his text autobiographical details suggesting everywhere that “you” and “he” is the split persona of the writer, he says in chapters 22 and 60 that “he” is anyone and not the self, and “you” is not the author. This is Gao’s “playfulness,” and he condemns himself for it. Willingly or unwillingly, Gao makes himself vulnerable to “misreading.” Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 74–118. Frederic Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 2000), 52–53. Gao, One Man’s Bible, 152. The libidinal relationship is described in chapters 2, 4, 8, 10, 12, 14, and 16. Gao, One Man’s Bible, chapter 56. Ibid., chapter 57. Ibid., 249–251. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 222. Gao, One Man’s Bible, 182–183. Ibid., 197. Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 54. Gao’s “purification” process would be closer to Buddhist satori than Christian redemption. Gao, One Man’s Bible, 250. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 303. In chapter 23, the narrator describes the fight between partisan groups and ends with the remark that “he” was “not there.” This is to echo the subsequent reflection of the “lie” of literature, which is by nature “fictive.” M. Middeke and Christina Wald, The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7, 9. Flatley, Affective Mapping, 73.

260

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

32. Ibid., 65, 67, 71. As Flatley explains, for Benjamin “cultural treasures” can only be viewed with horror, since one will not find there a recognition of one’s suffering, but justification for it. One must therefore view history from the point of view of history’s losers, to rescue from it collective images that have the power to startle one into righteous action. 33. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 154, 157. 34. Gao, One Man’s Bible, chapter 16. 35. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 112–113. 36. Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer, Acts of Memory, 46.

Chapter 18

Identity and Creation A Conversation with Gao Xingjian Michael Berry In January 2013, Gao Xingjian participated in the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Boston. Following the January 4 panel “Gao Xingjian on Literature and Theater,” on the evening of January 5, Gao Xingjian participated in a public dialogue touching on his early literary influences and his experiences during the early reform era, before turning to his views on literature, film, and theater. This is a slightly abridged record of that conversation. Michael Berry: During your childhood years, it was your mother who first introduced you to the arts and inspired your love of literature. Could you talk a little bit about your early literary awakening? What were some of the factors that led you down a path toward a creative life? Gao Xingjian: I never went to elementary school, and only attended one year of school during sixth grade. Before that, it was my mother who taught me how to read and write. She taught me how to recognize

262

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Chinese characters very early on. By the time I was eight years old I had already begun writing diary entries, which was also something that my mother taught me. In the ensuing years, I continued to keep a diary, and I did so right until the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. But when the Cultural Revolution broke out I ended up burning all my manuscripts and diaries—more than 30 kilograms of paper! My mother had been a member of an anti-Japanese theatrical troupe organized by the YMCA. I was born during the War of Resistance, so you could say I’m a child of the war. The first time I went onstage was when I was five years old. My mother took me onstage with her because the play needed a child for one of the roles. So, I began acting when I was five. It was natural for me to have a strong connection to the arts growing up in a family like this. I also naturally loved to draw and paint when I was a child. When I was ten years old, I filled an entire notebook with a story that I had written. I suppose you could say that was my first work of fiction. I wrote on one side of each page, leaving the other side blank to fill up with my drawings. That was my first story and set of illustrations. It was something like Robinson Crusoe, and I described my own fantasy world of a life filled with travel and adventure. I remember very clearly that I had filled up the entire notebook at the time, and that I was just ten years old. That was also when I started to draw. Our home was run in a very democratic fashion, something that was quite rare in China during that time. My parents never objected to what I did, providing I didn’t cause any trouble, which I never did! (Laughs) No matter what I did, my parents always encouraged me. So, I was born into a very healthy family environment. Owing to my father’s love of Chinese literature, we had a very large collection of classical Chinese literary works in the house. My mother, on the other hand, had an affinity for Western drama and Western literature, so we also had quite a few works of translated literature. From a very early age I was reading adult-level books. A love of reading was something that I developed at an early

Identity and Creation

263

age. This special environment was a very important condition for my later literary and artistic work. Michael Berry: In the late 1970s, when China was still relatively closed off to the outside world, you accompanied a delegation of veteran writers from the China Writers Association, including Ba Jin,1 on a trip to France. At the time, you even published an essay about this trip entitled “Ba Jin in Paris.” Just how important was that trip to France for you at the time? Did it have a big impact on your later creative works and your view of the world? Gao Xingjian: At the time, I served as Mr. Ba Jin’s interpreter. That was in fact the first delegation of Chinese writers to visit a foreign country after the Cultural Revolution. Since I was working for the China Writers Association as a translator at the time, I later also traveled to France and Italy, serving as the interpreter for the renowned poet Mr. Ai Qing.2 My essay “Ba Jin in Paris” was my very first publication. When the delegation returned to China, I was required to write a report, and the result was that essay. Before that time, I had written manuscripts amounting to several million Chinese characters, but I had burned all of them. The few items I had not burned did not get published. At one point, I had shown Mr. Ba Jin some of those surviving manuscripts, as well as some fiction that I had written later. He was obviously quite impressed, so that during our trip in Paris, he introduced me to several French writers by saying: “Now he’s a true writer.” I said, “Mr. Ba Jin, you can’t say that ...” After all, at the time I was just a low-level interpreter who had never published a single word. Since I had studied French at university, and at my workplace I had access to various French newspapers and periodicals, when I went to France I was not surprised by what I encountered. I had read so many works of Western literature since childhood, and was familiar with virtually all the great masterpieces of Western literature. So, there were no big surprises when I finally went to France. What I saw were things that I had already encountered in so many literary works. The one thing

264

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

that did shock me was when we visited the Louvre. To see for myself the masterpieces of Western oil painting for the first time was truly a shock. The following year when I went to Italy as Mr. Ai Qing’s interpreter, we visited eight cities, including Florence, Venice, and Rome, and I was responsible for arranging the itinerary. I was the only one who could read any Western language, and I said, “Of course we must see all the museums.” And so we visited every major art museum in Europe during that trip. The experience proved to be a real shock. In China at the time there was no way of seeing a single authentic Western painting. All I ever had access to were poor-quality reproductions, and even those were very difficult to come by. However, I was fortunate that I did have access to many of those reproductions. But once I saw the actual works, I knew I had to give up painting in oils! (Audience laughs) I think that was an important change, and afterward I thought if I wanted to accomplish something in art, I’d have to stop painting with oils and try to find my own path. Another eye-opening experience for me during this time was seeing Picasso’s ink paintings and noticing that the medium was described as “Chinese ink painting.” For a long time after that I was left in a state of crisis, wondering if I would ever be able to paint again. But after digging a bit deeper I discovered that Picasso’s ink paintings—and those of several other Western artists who were painting with ink—were actually quite simple. I felt that their understanding of ink painting was comparable to my own understanding of oil painting. (Laughs) At that point, I decided that if I were to pursue a certain direction in art I should return to traditional Chinese ink painting. Michael Berry: The early reform era in China was a very special period for a lot of people. After the country was closed to the Western world for so many years, suddenly Western art, philosophy, literature, and music began flooding in. At the same time, many people in China began to rediscover their own traditional culture: Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and other traditional philosophies and religions gradually started to creep back in. In literature and the creative arts, important

Identity and Creation

265

events included the rise of the literary journal Today, Stars Art Group, Misty poets, the literary search-for-roots movement, Fifth Generation filmmakers, and the avant-garde theater movement of which you were such an important part. How important was this period, from around 1978 until 1983, for you? What was your own state of mind during that period? This was also around the time you collaborated with Lin Zhaohua3 on the staging of your plays Alarm Signal, Bus Stop, and Wild Man. Could you talk a little bit about that era during the early 1980s? Gao Xingjian: After the Cultural Revolution, China finally began to allow literary and artistic creation to resume. This included allowing cultural organizations such as the China Writers Association and other arts groups that had been forcibly closed during the Cultural Revolution to resume work. I took advantage of the opportunity to publish some of my work. My first book was Preliminary Explorations into the Art of Modern Fiction, published in Guangzhou. The late 1970s was a time when it was finally possible for the publication of cultural content that did not overtly function as political propaganda. I had published an essay, “How Fiction Can Be Written,” in a magazine called Random Essays in which I discussed ways fiction could be written outside the prescribed government guidelines. The editor-in-chief of the magazine was an interesting character and he liked what I was doing. He said: “Keep going! Send me an essay for each issue!” Before long I had enough material for my first book. But just as I set foot into publishing my works, these essays brought catastrophe to my doorstep. Originally my book was only being read and circulated among younger and middle-aged writers and literary youths. But some of the established writers who read it, including Wang Meng,4 became excited and published articles in major newspapers encouraging people to read my book. Who would have imagined that this would grab the attention of some of the high-ranking officials running the China Writers Association? During a closed-door session, the party secretary of the China Writers Association, who was the Chinese Communist Party’s representative, said: “Some little writer out there has published an absurd reactionary little pamphlet that has

266

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

somehow won the acclaim of various younger and middle-aged writers, including even a few very well-known writers.” Criticisms were launched to mark the beginning of the debate between modernism and realism. Although it was called a debate, it was the start of censure and criticism. Soon after, my play Bus Stop was staged in Beijing at the People’s Art Theatre. It was not a public performance, and tickets were not sold to the public. It was more of a private performance for people working in theater circles, and we knew the authorities would never allow the play to be publicly performed. However, after a few performances, word started to get out. The party secretary from the China Writers Association came to see the play. When he showed up, the director of the People’s Art Theatre told me to sit with him and keep him company, so I did. I tried to be welcoming: “Welcome Comrade Feng Mu,5 I’m so glad you have come to see the play!” However, during the performance everyone in the audience was laughing except for him. (Laughs) He didn’t laugh once during the entire performance, even though the entire audience was laughing. I knew something was very wrong. When the play was over, he left without saying a word. Not long afterward, He Jingzhi6 of the Chinese Communist Party Central Propaganda Department, who oversaw the ideological content of art and literature, gave a speech during another closed-door session of the China Writers Association in which he said: “This play is even more Hai Rui Dismissed from Office than Hai Rui Dismissed from Office!7 It’s the most poisonous work of theater since the founding of our nation!” Everyone knew that Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was the work that sparked the Cultural Revolution. I knew that catastrophe was about to befall me, so I immediately fled Beijing. Michael Berry: I have heard scholars, readers, and people from the media use all kinds of terms to describe your identity: writer-in-exile, Chinese writer, French writer, Franco-Chinese writer, Sinophone writer, etc. Although there is much discussion about your “identity,” from reading your works, it seems that you are not terribly interested in these debates.

Identity and Creation

267

What is your take on the issue of “identity” as it pertains to your work? Is it an important factor in your writing and artistic works? Gao Xingjian: Subscribing to an identity is part of a political discourse; it’s a simple political discourse and a simple political label. Leading to the formation of identity are issues of political affirmation, ideological affirmation, race, and nationalism. But this kind of identity should have nothing to do with writers and artists. What is it that is important for a writer? It comes down to what he writes and how he writes it. Naturally, everyone has a nationality. As a person, I was once a “Chinese citizen,” but after 1989 my identity was that of “exile.” In France, I was a political refugee and my status was that of “political refugee.” However, before long I had yet another identity, that of “French citizen.” Once I was naturalized in France, I became a French citizen. Later, when I was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the French embassy arranged a large celebratory banquet in my honor, and even the French Minister of Culture traveled to Sweden to attend the ceremony. Although I am a French writer, this identity has very little relation to my creative work. In recent years, I have been spending my time not only in France but also traveling all over the world. For instance, today I happen to be in the United States, a few months ago I was in Luxembourg, and a month before that I was in the Czech Republic. You could say that if I wanted to, I could spend my time traveling the world. But in the end, I am a writer, and a writer can’t spend all the time traveling. There is another identity that I subscribe to, and that is my identity as a human being. And as far as this human being’s creative works and thoughts are concerned, I am a citizen of the world. When I am writing I never think about whether I am writing for a Chinese or a French audience. This notion doesn’t exist for me: I simply write about my experiences as a human being. As for who my readers are, or the country they live in, that is not important. Frankly speaking, my life today is already completely internationalized. My work has been translated into more than forty different languages. Whether looked at from the perspective

268

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

of my readers or my works, perhaps the best way to define my identity is as a citizen of the world. Michael Berry: In what ways did your life and writing change after being awarded the Nobel Prize? How did it affect your creative life? Gao Xingjian: As soon as I was awarded the prize, the media entered my life. It started with a phone call from the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, who called to tell me that I had been awarded the prize. Five minutes later—I didn’t have time to change clothes or put on my shoes —the doorbell started to ring. I looked through the peephole and there was already a crowd of reporters and camera crews outside. From that point, I was swept away by media invitations, and many were hard to refuse. My fax machine was like a waterfall spitting out a continuous cascade of paper. And every day the mailman would show up with a bag of letters that I didn’t have time to open, let alone read. My living room was filled with piles of unopened mail bags. After two years of this, I ended up with a serious illness and needed to be hospitalized. (Laughs) I had a brush with death and ended up having two carotid endarterectomy operations. After that it was only natural for me to start thinking about how to live the rest of my life and to get my body back in shape. I decided to refuse all media requests, to the best of my ability. After all, I’m not a newsworthy figure. I am at my core a writer and an artist: I have my own work to do. I don’t participate in politics, nor am I an ornament for politics. Being any kind of political ornamentation has nothing to do with me. The government, the media, and political parties are fond of taking care of such things, so there’s absolutely no reason for me to be involved. That’s not my job. I’ve already freed myself from the maelstrom of politics and have returned to my work as a creative artist. To put it another way, I have gone back to my original work as a writer and artist. So just what is my work? It concerns being human. I am a normal human being just like everyone else. But when I use my identity as a human being to engage in a dialogue with the world, I don’t represent a political view, political party, nation, or group of people. I’m just an

Identity and Creation

269

ordinary man. The only difference is that I use my genuine voice as a human being to open a dialogue with the world. This is the work that I want to carry out. And none of the literary or artistic works that I create should be regarded as any kind of “call to arms.” And so I have returned to my own individual creative world. Michael Berry: Another change that occurred after you won the Nobel Prize was that after having worked as an artist, theorist, dramatist, and writer, you found yourself stepping into a brand-new artistic realm and began exploring the world of cinema. What was it that led you to start making films? The aesthetic vision of your films is quite different from all forms of commercial cinema. Do you look at your film work as an attempt to challenge your audiences and push us to rethink various categories of aesthetic meaning? Gao Xingjian: Those images on the screen just now are from my opera Snow in August. I wanted to try my hand at opera, so I contacted my composer friend Xu Shuya8 and invited him to compose the music. As soon as we sat down to discuss the music, the collaboration proceeded seamlessly. Since childhood I had always regarded opera as the highest form of stage art; now I would soon realize my childhood ambition of bringing my opera to the stage. (Laughs) I also wanted to make films. You could say that I started to think about making films when I was eighteen. I went to college when I was seventeen, and during my sophomore year, when I was eighteen, I wrote my first screenplay. At the time, I had read a book on film editing and the art of montage by the Soviet silent-film pioneer Eisenstein. I have always felt that Eisenstein was responsible for elevating film to a true art form. After reading the book I realized how much freedom there was in cinema and that there were many other ways to make films apart from what we had been exposed to. I began to imagine a different kind of cinema, but it was only forty years later that I finally completed what would become my first film: Silhouette/Shadow (2008).

270

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

But all through those years, I never gave up on my dream of one day making films. When I was still in China I visited more than ten different film studios, when film directors sought me out following the success of my plays. I also wrote another screenplay around that time, but it was never produced. Later there was a German film director who wanted to collaborate with me. But when I showed him the script he said, “Sorry, but you’ve really gone a bit too far out there with this one!” (Laughs) This screenplay later became the basis for the short story “Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather.” There was another screenplay I wrote in France, but it was never produced either. A French film producer heard I was interested in making films and came to see me. But in the end the project did not materialize because my approach was not consistent with the requirements of a commercial film. The producer said, “I think it would be best if we started with a film about your experiences during the Cultural Revolution.” (Laughs) But my idea for film had absolutely nothing to do with any of that! If you want to get a sense of what my screenplay looked like, you can read my short story “In an Instant.” That was another of my screenplays that I rewrote as a short story. Going back to the early 1980s, several young Chinese film directors organized a film studies conference and invited me to discuss French New Wave films. I figured that since there was quite a bit about that subject already available in translation, it was best to talk about my own views of cinema. So, I put some of my new ideas out there. I explained that I saw cinema as an art form based on the three elements of image, sound, and language, and that these three elements could be relatively independent and discard narrative structure. All films today, whether they are documentaries or feature films, use images to tell a story or critique some event. Because of this, narration became the fundamental structure of film. But I thought that if that structure was discarded, we would be able to create a brand-new type of film. So, I put forward my

Identity and Creation

271

idea of “tripartite film,” which is the basis of the “cinematic poetry” that I write and produce nowadays. To put it simply, this is the fundamental starting point for my films. Naturally, this type of film will never win over commercial distributors. Anyone interested in digging deeper into my thoughts regarding art and literature over the past decade can look at my book Aesthetics and Creation, which has an entire chapter devoted to my views on cinema. Audience question: Could you talk about how you employ music in your operatic works? Do you use Chinese or Western music? What are some of your considerations when pairing music and sound design with your stage work? Gao Xingjian: I’d like to use this question to say a bit more about my operatic work. I have many ideas when it comes to opera, and creating an opera is extremely time consuming. My opera Snow in August was a collaboration with a group of Peking Opera performers that premiered at the National Theatre in Taipei. The project was a joint production between the National Theatre in Taiwan and Opéra de Marseille in France, so after the premiere in Taipei we took the production to Marseille. There were fifty Peking Opera actors that we used, but the production was not a Peking Opera. I forced these actors to let go of everything they had learned through their training in Peking Opera, and that was extremely difficult. Most Peking Opera actors begin their training as eight- or tenyear-olds. They attend Chinese opera school where they learn martial arts and have intensive voice lessons. The entire process is quite formulaic. I, on the other hand, wanted to stage a modern opera, but a modern opera utilizing actors trained in traditional Chinese theater, so I made this special request regarding the actors. In Western opera, there is usually no real acting to speak of, the actors just stand there and sing. But I wanted to stage an opera with real acting, and that was my first requirement. To help these performers learn my new performance method, I had them first train with a Western voice trainer for a year to rediscover their voices. At the same time, I didn’t want them to sing traditional

272

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Western-style opera, I wanted to find a method that would enable these performers with years of Peking Opera training to project their voices. This period of training lasted almost an entire year. At the same time, I had them simultaneously undergoing another type of training, with a modern dance choreographer that I was collaborating with. Through their modern dance training I wanted them to relearn how to use their bodies. Traditional Peking Opera performance training is very formulaic, so it took a whole year to break the mold and retrain the performers. As for the score, I collaborated with the composer Xu Shuya. During our discussions about the music, I presented Xu Shuya with three requests: 1) I didn’t want the score to have any trace of Peking Opera; 2) I didn’t want anything that resembled lyrical Italian opera; 3) I didn’t want the actors to sing in the popular operatic style of modern and contemporary opera, such as the tradition of Arnold Schoenberg where the voice functions as a musical instrument. At the same time, I wanted a score. I wanted Xu Shuya to deliver a highly listenable and moving score, but I wanted it to be atonal. He was an extremely capable composer and produced a score that I found quite moving. Even the conductor at the Opéra de Marseille commented, “This is an opera score that deserves to be mentioned in the history of music.” Audience question: You describe yourself as a citizen of the world, but you spent your formative years in China, and your experience in China must have had a profound influence on you. Do you not identify with that experience? Or somehow refuse to accept its impact upon you? Gao Xingjian: I left China twenty-five years ago right at the New Year, and I arrived in Paris just before Christmas later that year. Ever since, I have had absolutely no contact with China. I have never gone back, nor can I ever go back. You could say that twenty-five years ago I was reborn. I was born in mainland China, so it is only natural for me to have been heavily influenced by Chinese culture. And in my body of work there is, of course, a lot of material about China and Chinese culture. This culture remains a big part of who I am, and even today I continue

Identity and Creation

273

to write in Chinese. But I should point out that I also write in French. I have written five plays in French. So, I also qualify as a French-language writer. Not long ago I attended the Pisa International Book Fair as a French-language writer from France; in fact, I attended with the French ambassador. The book fair was dominated by French literature, and I participated in the ribbon-cutting ceremony with the ambassador. So, in moments like that I am very much a French writer, and French culture is very much a part of who I am as well. The recent French plays that I have written have absolutely no connection to China and are not set in China. A collection of these plays was just published in Italian, and several of them have already been performed in Italy, as well as Spain, the United States, and other European countries. There is a theater director in the audience today who staged an adaptation of my play The Other Shore in New York. I wrote the play many years ago in Chinese when I was in China. But when I saw the production stills from the New York production I could not identify a single Chinese symbol or cultural element. This is a play that has been performed on college campuses throughout America as well as all over the world. But no one ever looks at it as a “Chinese play.” As I said during my Nobel acceptance speech, “My plays and fiction all carry with them universal meaning.” In that sense, it doesn’t matter if I am writing in Chinese or in French. Nor does it matter if a given work is set against a Chinese cultural backdrop or a French cultural backdrop. If my work does not speak to ordinary people on a universal level that goes beyond national and linguistic boundaries, I feel the work has not been successful. I hope that my work will be successful, and so I hope it can transcend linguistic and even cultural limitations. It should be a work that can bring people together on a universal level. I believe that this is both the function and purpose of literature.

274

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Notes 1. Ba Jin (1904–2005) was one of the most widely read writers in modern China. A key figure of the May Fourth era, he is best known for his Turbulent Stream trilogy, which consists of the novels Family, Spring, and Autumn. 2. Ai Qing (1910–1996) was one of China’s most acclaimed modern poets. He studied in France from 1929 to 1932 and later joined the communists in Yan’an during the 1940s. He is the father of the artist Ai Weiwei. 3. Theater director Lin Zhaohua (b. 1936) was instrumental in the Chinese experimental theater movement of the 1980s. He is the founder of the Lin Zhaohua Studio and has worked in numerous genres, ranging from Peking Opera to Shakespeare. 4. Wang Meng (b. 1934) is a prominent writer who has published many novels, short stories, and essays. He has won numerous literary awards, the most recent being the 2015 Mao Dun Prize. He has also been active in politics, serving as China’s Minister of Culture (1986–1989). His bestknown works include Bolshevik Salute, Alienation, Snowball, and The Stubborn Porridge. 5. Feng Mu (1919–1995) was a writer and literary critic who held many high-level cultural posts in the Chinese government, including vicechair of the China Writers Association. 6. He Jingzhi (b. 1924) is a Chinese poet and dramatist who served in several high-level government posts, including assistant minister of the Chinese Ministry of Culture and assistant minister of the Chinese Ministry of Propaganda. 7. Hai Rui Dismissed from Office is a historical drama written by the former vice mayor of Beijing, Wu Han. The play was completed in 1961 and portrayed an “upright official” of the Ming dynasty named Hai Rui who was eventually purged. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, the play was targeted for criticism, as it was alleged that Wu Han was using the story to make critical commentary on Mao’s policies during the Great Leap Forward. The nationwide attack turned the play into a “poisonous weed,” made Wu Han an “enemy of the people,” and helped unleash the Cultural Revolution. 8. Xu Shuya (b. 1961) is a composer and professor of composition at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. His award-winning work has been

Identity and Creation

275

performed around the world. In 2002, he composed the music for Gao Xingjian’s three-act opera Snow in August.

Chapter 19

The Authorial Self in Gide’s The Fruits of the Earth, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain Pan Shuyang

When as a twenty-two-year-old I first began reading Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, I felt I risked not being able to understand it. I was anxious because I had identified this risk. Perhaps I was anxious not about understanding the book but about reading it correctly. The latter indicated a young reader’s awe on confronting Soul Mountain as a literary classic and its body of related literary criticism. What if my interpretation completely overlapped with or completely overlooked existing criticism?

278

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

My anxiety took control, and I stopped reading properly. I now realize how naïve I was. The book was created by the author to pursue inner freedom, but from the start I had chosen to be constrained by my own pretentiousness. I had overvalued my “self” in the reading process to the extent that I had almost forgotten the existence of my “self”: I was trying to produce an interpretation that would please targeted readers and had failed to realize that reading a good book is to please oneself. My epiphany can be credited to Gao Xingjian’s unique narrative voice in Soul Mountain that I discovered on rereading the novel four years afterward. It is quite hard to characterize or give concrete form to this extraordinary innovation without comparisons with other narrative voices. In the present essay, by close readings of excerpts from Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, André Gide’s The Fruits of the Earth, and Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet—all of which are structured as “open diaries”—I explore how Gao Xingjian’s unique and innovative breakthrough in narrative voice contributes to understanding his representation of his self. Sentence 1: Gao, Soul Mountain When you are lying on the bed looking at the ceiling, the light projected onto the white ceiling too can undergo many transformations. If you concentrate on looking at yourself, you will find that your self will gradually separate from the self you are familiar with and multiply into many startling forms. So if I have to make a summary of myself, it terrifies me. I don’t know which of the many faces represents me more and the more closely I look the clearer the transformations become, and finally only bewilderment remains.1 Sentence 2: Gide, The Fruits of the Earth [Nathaniel] Understand that at every moment of the day God in His entirety may be yours. Let your longing be love and your possession a lover’s. For what is a longing that is not effectual?2

The Authorial Self

279

Sentence 3: Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.3 On the surface, the first half of Sentence 1 and that of Sentence 2 have a narrator “I” talking to a character “you.” But for Sentence 2 the reading rhythm begins to accelerate at the point of “God.” It turns progressively into a rising tone, increasingly more uncontrollable by the reader. I as a reader gradually become “you” to whom the narrator “I” talks; “you” who is silent and tamed is always waiting for the dictation of the powerful and passionate narrator “I.” Who is the narrator “I”? This “you” in Sentence 2 does not know. But what can be confirmed is that the narrator “I” and “you” are two individuals. Now turn to Sentence 3. Compared to Sentence 2, which is structured as a question, Sentence 3 is a declarative sentence. The narrator “I” is doing a thing whose quality is too abstract and individualistic to be crystallized by a reader’s imagination. But I as a reader can still feel the rhythm of the abstract behavior of the narrator “I,” which is slow (e.g., “Inch by inch”), continuous (e.g., “Bit by bit”) and careful (e.g., with forceps), with uncertainty. Such uncertainty does not manifest itself in the process of “gave birth” but in the complexity of the action, “wrench.” The action of wrenching is motivated by the aspiration to know the self of the narrator “I,” but this “self” is not only unknown but also unknowable. The self exists in infinite and inseparable temporal moments and spatial continuity. In other words, each temporal–spatial component makes up an utterly mysterious possibility that constitutes the self. So the action of wrenching is in effect to be sober about each possibility, and then to trace its development and be able to recognize it. This is almost mission impossible. It seems that the narrator “I” has already noticed this, so he does not hurry and, rather, is very calm, trying to make sure that

280

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

every step of “wrenching”—tracing and recognizing—is accurate. It is noteworthy that “to be accurate” means “to be true.” It is time to return to Sentence 1. It is more concrete in terms of content than Sentence 2 and Sentence 3. At least the first half of it draws a picure, in which the narrator’s psychological preparation for perceiving and capturing his “self” is well presented. He quietens his body and relaxes his spirit. At this moment, the narrator’s body is pushed far away to the extent that his perception and consciousness, which the narrator names “you,” can no longer feel that his body exists. In this sense, the existence of this “you” is similar to the renowned portrait contained in the Albert Camus essay “The Wind at Djemila”: “never have I felt so deeply and at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.”4 In this picture it is not so much that “you” are looking at the ceiling and capturing the changing shapes of the light projected onto it as that “you” are a mysterious “projection” of the narrator “I” and are contemplated, traced, and anchored by the narrator “I.” The narrator “I” and “you” build up a visualized inner space in which, when “I” am gazing at “you,” “you” are also gazing at “I [me].” Filtered through such a visualized inner space created by the interaction between “I” and “you,” the existences of “I,” “you,” and the outside world are transformed into new forms and generate new meanings. All transformations and meanings dwell in the inner space; moreover, the boundary of this space, following the fluidity of the perspectives of “I” and of “you,” is always in flux. In fact, this passage has already well explained itself; although the existence of the self can be sensed if the individual tries hard, the result of such sensation is “bewilderment,” because the self is forever always changing, unrepresentable, and indefinable; if one intends to represent such uncertainty that is the self by resorting to language, then one would probably be “terrified.” It is easy for readers to tell how Gao Xingjian is different from Gide in terms of his narrating tone and how he is akin to Pessoa, who is discreet, modest, and rational when exploring and articulating the self.

The Authorial Self

281

In his preface to the French edition of 1927, Gide claims that one of the reasons he has written The Fruits of the Earth is a reaction to the morbid atmosphere in which literature is dominated by artificiality. Hence, he feels the urgency to bring literature “down to earth once more.”5 Obviously, however, literature is not the motif threaded through the whole book; rather, the narrator’s attention is more centered on enlightening people about how to live their being to the fullest when the God of the outside world is unavailable. The narrator keeps trying to instill in his disciple Nathaniel the idea that he should not wait for his God to appear, because he himself possesses the God.6 Published in 1897, The Fruits of the Earth manifests itself more like a zealous response to Nietzsche’s famed dictum “God is dead,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra.7 In this sense, when the heaven of God collapses, Gide advocates, in the way the narrator educates Nathaniel, that readers discover the meaning of human life based on a human being’s perspective rather than on God’s. Nathaniel, known originally as a follower of Jesus according to the Gospel of John, is now an adherent of the narrator; in other words, the narrator is acting in the role of Jesus, or at least in the role of a powerful spiritual mentor whose authority is manifested through the obedience of his readers. Speaking in a voice like Zarathustra’s, the Jesus-like narrator urges readers “to feel capable of doing” and to “assume as much humanity as possible.”8 This was Gide’s unconditional confidence in humanity, though at the time he lacked the competence to predict the aftermath of a humanity without a sense of awe in the supervision of its own power. Also in the preface to the 1927 edition, which was published thirty years after the first edition, Gide did not forget to mention his “fidelity” in those years: “if I examine my life, the dominating feature I note in it, so far from being inconsistency, is, on the contrary, fidelity.”9 As one of the most renowned leftists of his day in Europe who invested his early life in pursuing political idealism, especially in the communist enthusiasm of the 1930s,10 Gide betrayed his “fidelity” ten years afterward, by publishing his Return from the U.S.S.R. in 1937. By particularizing the brainwashing

282

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

of the population, the unsatisfactory socioeconomic situation, and the leadership cult, Gide debunked the political myth of the Soviet Union as the idealized regime. In the book, Gide must voice his dissidence—thus betray himself—because the truth he confronts is that when God is dead, one of the possibilities for humanity is to turn to inhumanity. After Return from the U.S.S.R., Gide verified his integrity with his honesty and his conscience, at the cost of gainsaying the “truth” he once believed in and the confidence he once exuded when preaching that “truth.” It was due to Gide that I started to reflect upon the question: how to differentiate the truth in the true sense and the illusion that disguises itself as the truth? What tone of voice should be used when articulating the truth that I believe to be so? In this sense, Fernando Pessoa inspired me. When he declares, “Let the importance lie in your look, not in the thing you look at,”11 Gide does not observe the world and people according to humanity per se but according to the omnipotence and omniscience by which he characterizes humanity. Contrary to Gide, Pessoa has a profound understanding of the weakness of humanity; such weakness serves as the starting point from which he collects his senses of, feelings about, and reflections on the outside world. His acknowledgment of the limitations of humanity and the predicament in which human beings live is not from a theoretical or conceptual analysis, but from his vivid personal experience as an individual. In other words, his understanding of human beings is derived from his unique understanding of himself and his own limitations. Therefore, Pessoa employs his own experience as his frame of reference to present the possibilities of humanity in a cautious, quiet, and low-profile way. To Pessoa, the judgment of truth must be dependent on the individual’s self-awareness. His narrating tone in this sense is far from confident but very modest and even humble, because he does not expect that his individual truth could manipulate or influence others’ independent thinking. To put it another way, if Pessoa admitted some pressure or challenge that obstructs his writing process, the pressure or challenge would be whether the language he relies on is precise and competent enough to capture the living experience of

The Authorial Self

283

the individual. He does not aim to persuade his readers to submit their subjectivity and individuality to the author. Or maybe he does not expect that he could have readers. The Book of Disquiet was published nearly sixty years after Pessoa’s death. When he was writing it, he was just talking to and exploring himself, as well as concretizing his imagination, emotion, and contemplation through literature. In The Fruits of the Earth, the young Gide embraces and celebrates his passion with poetic vitality, whereas Pessoa cools his passion until it subsides. By doing so, Pessoa can prevent his individual consciousness from being enslaved by irrationality and other impetuous sentiments and then protect its independence and autonomy. Pessoa always locates himself at the margins of his inner world, as a bystander who contemplates himself and whose expression of the self and humanity is carefully based on his own ability and inability to perceive himself. Following the analysis of The Book of Disquiet, I define the key word “cold” of Gao Xingjian’s “cold literature,”12 widely noted as characteristic of his writing, as a cool or detached process. The heated vapor of fanaticism, “momentary impulses or feelings of frustration,” are condensed through a pair of cold eyes “to dispassionately observe the living phenomena of the boundless universe.”13 The prerequisite for the writer to guarantee such a cool state of mind is to acquire “distance” from the heated “center”—be it the center of political machines, of diverse –isms, or of market mechanisms. How, then, to acquire the required distance? Gao Xingjian’s answer is “self-exile,” which in Soul Mountain is presented in the form of “travel.” The narrator–protagonist travels not only on the margins of China’s geographical space and of Chinese culture to reveal the vitality of Chinese subcultures but also at the margins of his inner nature, to witness how the perceptions of time, space, nature, culture, as well as the self all grow in his aesthetic consciousness. Such travel brings the narrator a sense of existence and, more importantly, a sense of position: because of the latter, the narrator is sensitively aware of how critical modesty is to human beings. Specifically, embraced by Mother Nature, the narrator,

284

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

who is also a traveler, deeply understands that a human being is no more than a carrier of a finite quantity of time and space, when nature projects herself, that is, her infinity and majesty, onto the inner scenery of the traveler. The interaction between the loneliness of travel and the traveler making creative use of his loneliness invents a wonderful flow of conversation among the three pronominal figures— “I,” “you,” and “she”—who are different facets of the person of the narrator. This conversation is born out of loneliness, but it is also born in defiance of, or to resist, loneliness. As the conversation grows more and more profound, it seems that the image of the self becomes more and more conceivable while less and less knowable, because the self, which ceaselessly renews itself by absorbing the spiritual nutrition provided by nature and culture, turns out to be something forever in the making. In other words, the self is always producing possibilities characterized by incompletion and uncertainty. However, as argued above, representing such uncertainty is almost impossible. This is the major difference between Gao Xingjian and the young André Gide. For Gao Xingjian, the more he knows, the less confident he is about articulating his ideas. This is because he is profoundly aware of his limitation and inability to restore the truth of what he already knows and what he does not know. Gao Xingjian’s narrator in Soul Mountain, like Pessoa’s, is also an onlooker who witnesses the nature of selfhood without being involved in it. This position of the narrator is inspired by Gao Xingjian’s reverence for truth per se and his awe of the possibility of representing the truth. When the existence of the self opens opportunities for the writer to represent it, the writer will confront another pressure, generated by language. How does a serious writer inject the truth of transient feelings into language with honesty and sincerity? How does the writer then endow language, which is used by everyone and is defined by certain semantic structures and grammar, with the writer’s own uniqueness? Bearing this in mind, it is not difficult to understand what Gao Xingjian says of writers in his book of essays Without Isms: “They are only responsible for the language that they rely on for writing.”14 In this sense, the insight of employing

The Authorial Self

285

the pronominal characters “I,” “you,” and “she” is also a compromise for achieving the truth of the self between Gao’s creative treatment of loneliness and the pressure that language exerts on him. Gao Xingjian’s plays, fiction, paintings, and films are like an everdeepening impression, and such an impression derives from his unique experimentations in manipulating the narrative voice. When I, as a reader, face the textual “you,” I certainly understand that this “you” does not indicate me, the reader, but I spontaneously project it onto my readership. Then I realize that Soul Mountain is such a book that invites me to digress from the text, or at least encourages me to create distance from the text. Hence, “digress–return” as a rhythm dominates my reading experience and gives me a reading euphoria. It is because of this rhythm that I can half detach myself from the textual world and yet maintain my freedom of thinking. What is freedom of thinking? It is how Gao Xingjian has conceived Soul Mountain as a literary work for his own aesthetic pleasure and enjoyment.

286

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Notes 1. Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain, trans. Mabel Lee (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 150. 2. André Gide, The Fruits of the Earth (New York: Penguin, 1970), 25. 3. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), 120. 4. Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintages, 1970), 75. 5. Gide, Fruits of the Earth, 11. 6. Ibid., 25. 7. Scholars have noted Gide’s responses to Nietzsche’s influence on him in his writings, though many of these responses are taken as misunderstandings of or objections to Nietzsche’s original viewpoints. See Catharene Hill Savage, “‘Les Nourritures Terrestres’ and ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra,’” The South Central Bulletin 21, no. 4 (1961): 51–55; Michael Lucey, Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 217–220. 8. Gide, Fruits of the Earth, 21. 9. Ibid., 12. 10. Michael Lucey argues that his later book, Later Fruits of the Earth, which is usually considered Gide’s spiritual continuance of The Fruits of the Earth, is “a text infused with his communist enthusiasms of the 1930s.” Lucey regards Later Fruits of the Earth as “an odd and provocative attempt to combine the rhapsodic style of the earlier Nourritures Terrestres [The Fruits of the Earth] with his left-wing leanings.” Lucey, Gide’s Bent, 7, 192. 11. Gide, Fruits of the Earth, 18. 12. Gao Xingjian defines his writings as “cold literature.” For him, “Cold literature is literature that entails fleeing in order to exist, it is literature that refuses to be strangled by society in its quest for spiritual salvation.” Gao Xingjian, Cold Literature: Selected Works by Gao Xingjian, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong and Mabel Lee (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005), 24. 13. Gao Xingjian, Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), 10.

The Authorial Self

287

14. Gao Xingjian, “Without Isms,” in Gao, Without Isms (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 2000), 10.

Epilogue

A Panoramic View of Gao Xingjian’s World Liu Zaifu

The numerous articles and books on Gao Xingjian that exist generally focus on particular areas of his fiction, plays, painting, film, or poetry, or use his essays to explore his ideas on literature and creative aesthetics. It is hard to find comprehensive surveys of his creations and ideas, because his creative world simply goes on growing and expanding, and it is not easy to keep track of new developments. It is a pity he has announced his retirement, but this gives researchers the chance to survey the entire corpus of his creative output. Gao Xingjian has produced detailed studies on the works he has created in various genres. In China, he published two collections, Preliminary Explorations into the Art of Modern Fiction (1982) and In Search of Modern Theatre (1988). After relocating to France, he published five collections

290

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

in succession, The Case for Literature (1996), Another Kind of Aesthetics (2001),1 Aesthetics and Creation (2008), On Drama (co-authored with Fang Zixun, a.k.a. Gilbert C.F. Fong; 2010), and Freedom and Literature (2014). He is an extraordinary multidimensional writer and artist, as well as a thinker who formulates his own ideas and totally rejects ideological constraints. Unlike the philosopher, he does not seek to put creation and thinking into theoretical frameworks, and his thinking, charged with vitality and openness, never sets out to pursue so-called “ultimate truth.” Indeed, he is concerned with the continual deepening of knowledge about the world and human life and seeks to know more and more, and thus replaces the ontology and various value judgments of philosophy. It is impossible to make a comprehensive analysis of Gao Xingjian’s works, so using images from his creations, I intend to penetrate his world and make sketches to facilitate access to the rich ideas and techniques offered in his works.2 His artistic world extends from ancient myths and epics to modern fables, from folk songs and storytelling to novels that break through conventional structures. His cine-poems and cinematic historical epics simply transcend any conventional patterns. The images that appear range from the Heavenly Emperor and spirits to death and demons, the former as in Of Mountains and Seas (1989) and the latter as in City of the Dead (1991). The leisurely wandering of his novel Soul Mountain (1990) deals with the human world, and so does that realistic to the point of virtual documentary novel, One Man’s Bible (1999). In the latter, China under the dictatorship of Mao Zedong as well as the decadence of contemporary Western society are portrayed with a universality transcending any cultural divisions between East and West. His broad artistic world cannot be accommodated within the structures of classicism, romanticism, realism, surrealism, or modernism, and defying categorization, it seems that one can only call it Gao Xingjian’s world. One can gain access to Gao’s world via heaven. In his heaven, it is not God alone who is revered. There are also four heavenly emperors: Protector God in the east, Flame Emperor in the south, Yellow Emperor

A Panoramic View of Gao Xingjian’s World

291

in the north, and Queen Mother of the West in the west. One divided into four is probably a residual memory of the tigress totem from the old stone age of humankind. The founding god Nüwa, who split heaven and earth and created human beings in her belly, is even older, and the writing of human history begins with her. This is not something Gao Xingjian has fabricated, and is verified in surviving texts of the Huaxia culture of remote antiquity. Moreover, God in Gao’s works is sometimes a frog with eyes that open and close, and speaks a language that is incomprehensible to humans, as in the final chapter of his novel Soul Mountain. At other times God is a strange creature living in the bottom of a well, as in his long poem “Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts,”3 and sometimes God assuming the form of a beggar suddenly appears, as in the film Requiem for Beauty (2013). Gao is not an atheist, but he does not have religious beliefs. While he reveres Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch of Chan Buddhism, his opera Snow in August (2000), which he wrote and directed, contains no sacred portrayals. Huineng died peacefully in a seated position, but he bestowed a wealth of wisdom to humankind. Gao Xingjian’s works constantly mock death, but never blaspheme religion like those of the materialists. He is reverent toward the unknowable, but he is not religious. Also, with neither a rock-hard materialist nor an idealist worldview, by surveying the world with his cold eyes, he leaves behind his individual creations. His interest in ancient myths is not limited to childhood times; with many years of research and reflection from his teenage years to maturity, he pieced together the hazy memories of the ancient Huaxia people into the huge historical epic play Of Mountains and Seas (1993). The play pares away the later annotations of imperial mandates and ethical teachings, returning to the original, and certainly is comparable to the myths and historical epics of ancient Greece. Of Mountains and Seas provides stories of humankind’s origins and understanding of the world, and is worthy of deep research. In Gao Xingjian’s historical epic, the founding goddess has created the world, but there is turmoil in the heavenly court because of

292

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

the endless squabbling of the princes, which wreaks havoc in the world and interferes with people’s livelihood. In the myth, the Gatekeeper God, Yi, was ordered to pacify the world, but when he shot dead the sons of the heavenly emperors with his arrows, he was banished to the human world. However, faced with passions and lust, life and death, this heroic savior again ran into trouble and was finally beaten to death by the crowds. The first human image from the legend was thus produced: existing in a predicament, struggling to survive. The heavenly emperors were forever at war, and the protracted war between Flame Emperor and Yellow Emperor turned heaven and earth upside down, so that monsters emerged to show off their magical powers. There was Xingtian, who was decapitated but went on fighting; Kuafu, who chased after the sun; Yinglong, who grew a new head whenever it was cut off; and Gonggong, who toppled the pillar supports of heaven and caused havoc on Buzhou Mountain. These rich and complex images inevitably give rise to a series of metaphysical thoughts. The images of resentful and passionate women such as Hanba, who covered the sky in dust, and Jingwei, who filled up the sea, touch upon human nature and human emotions. When the Heavenly Emperor’s eldest grandson, Gun, stole Ever-Growing Soil from heaven to control the floods, the Heavenly Emperor ordered that he be stabbed to death, and when his son Yu the Great emerged from Gun’s belly, he was ordered to complete his father’s mission. What right or wrong, or rationality is in all this? After considerable difficulties, the world was settled, but when Windshield turned up late for the inauguration ceremony of Yu the Great, Yu ordered his beheading. The myth ends at this point, and the writing of the imperial eras of human beings begin. The heavenly courts of creation myths and the human world are equally absurd, and history has always been like this. In Gao Xingjian’s world, the heavenly court is presented, and so is hell. His play City of the Dead (1996), which draws on Splitting the Coffin from the repertory of traditional Peking Opera, had been commissioned as a dance drama by the dancer Jiang Qing. The ancient version of the play

A Panoramic View of Gao Xingjian’s World

293

was based on the tale in storyteller prompt books, and by poking fun at Zhuangzi for testing his wife, it gives a lesson in ethics and morality. However, Gao Xingjian rewrote the tale into an absurd and irreverent work. He says that while traveling in the Ghost City of Fengdu in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River in Sichuan, he was enlightened by the statues of Yama King of Hell; the judges; the two guardians of the underworld, Ox Head and Horse Face; and the witches and demon messengers that stood in all the old temples. He also revised the local beggar songs people used to sing when offering incense and praying. As in the case of another of his epic plays, Wild Man (1995), he selected large amounts of material from the songs of folk storytellers and the fragments of folk epics. In his absurdist play, City of the Dead, human nature is utterly shambolic and totally defies the possibility of any sensible ordering; likewise, in the netherworld there is no rationality to be upheld. The play appears to be extremely funny, startlingly strange, but is in fact a profound portrayal of the real world and real human life. Gao Xingjian projected Beckett’s absurd into ancient myths and folk legends, and also projected Kafka’s modern fables into contemporary society. Searching for the wild man in Wild Man and treating trash as art in The Man Who Questions Death (2004) are surely cases of extreme absurdity in the social realities of contemporary Eastern and Western societies. The scope of Gao Xingjian’s works is extensive, and from epic myths to folk legends, all form a part of Gao Xingjian’s world. His novel Soul Mountain introduces ancient romances and jottings, documents the shaman practices and customs of minority peoples living on the frontiers, while dealing with real dilemmas in life and in so doing triggering a multitude of thoughts. This is something rarely found in romantic or realist modes of narrative fiction. Critics usually label him as modernist or avant-garde, failing to comprehend that he has far transcended the ossified tenets of modernism. Indeed, in the early 1980s his Preliminary Explorations into the Art of Modern

294

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Fiction (1982) and his play Absolute Signal (1982) sparked a controversy over modernism and realism, and he was criticized; and his play Bus Stop (1983) was classified as absurdist and banned. His second book of essays, In Search of Modern Theatre (1988), was printed, but distribution was withheld for almost a year. He has never acknowledged the modernist or absurdist labels people have applied to him, and he has his own ideas for giving new life to Chinese fiction and drama. Back in 1983, when Bus Stop was published, it had the subtitle “A Lyrical Comedy about Life,” and he called his representative work of fiction, Soul Mountain, a flow of language. His innovations in fiction and drama—from work in progress to completed work—have a creative aesthetics that he condones, and by means of which he separates himself from philosophers and from aesthetic thinking that is a branch of philosophy. His play The Other Shore (1986) is impossible to categorize, and like his earlier Soliloquy (1985), does not have a story with a plot or set out to mold characters: it is also used for actor training. On the stage, a veteran actor demonstrating stage techniques tells everything to be known about the vicissitudes of life. A group of young actors rehearse a game, and a woman who had taught them language is throttled by them because the violence of language has made them crazy; a person wants to be human, but everyone stops him, so he becomes mentally and physically exhausted and gives up. Experiences like this occur in life all the time, and it is in this way that history is repeated. So it is not surprising that performances of The Other Shore resonated with audiences from Taiwan and Hong Kong to Europe, and then on to Australia and America. In Dialogue and Rebuttal (1993), which Gao wrote after relocating to France, he introduced the Chan Buddhist gongan (Japanese, koan) response pattern into his plays. In the first part of the play a man and woman in contemporary times meet by chance, engage in sex and afterward have nothing to talk about, and end the relationship. In the second part of the play, the man and the woman have nothing to do with each other, and each speaks but without conveying meaning. They contrast with the monk who throughout is at the side of the stage,

A Panoramic View of Gao Xingjian’s World

295

silent, speechless, and engaged in Buddhist practices: meaning lies in what is not spoken. The play is similar to Bus Stop, which he wrote in China. A group of people waiting by a bus-stop sign talk and think about ordinary everyday things, and after various trifling incidents while waiting, ten years have passed, and finally they realize the bus stop had long since been discontinued. Among them, only one person, seeing none of the buses stopping, directly walks off without a word. There is no speculative philosophy involved, but as French philosopher Jean-Pierre Zarader writes in “Gao Xingjian and Philosophy” (see chapter 2 of the present volume), in Gao Xingjian’s works, “philosophy is always present.” This sort of philosophical thinking that is unrelated to philosophical formulation permeates the entire corpus of Gao Xingjian’s creations. Barely three months after the Tiananmen events of 1989, Gao Xingjian quickly wrote a play about this contemporary event that had been commissioned by an American theater group. However, the play Escape had no Hollywood heroes and reverted to the mode of an ancient Greek tragedy, while treating the same time, location, and event. The three characters in the play escape from the bloody military crackdown and hide in a disused warehouse on the outskirts of the city, but cannot escape the hell of their inner minds. The play shows a totally new theme: it is comparatively easy to escape from the shadow of politics, but hard to escape the hell of one’s self. Gao rejected the theater company’s request for revisions, paid for the English translation of his play, and withdrew his publication rights. No one could have predicted that in the thirty years following the 1992 premiere at Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern in Stockholm, the play would be staged in Eastern Europe and Western Europe, North and South America, and Asia and Africa. To designate the play a classic is not an exaggeration. At the time the Chinese authorities and overseas opposition factions regarded Escape as a political work, but it far surpasses real politics, and is a philosophical play about life. Between Life and Death (1991), Nocturnal Wanderer (1993), Weekend Quartet (1996), The Man Who Questions Death (2004), and Song of the

296

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Night (2010) are a group of plays that he first wrote in French and later rewrote in Chinese. These plays turn from real society to the inner mind of the individual, completely dispense with an Eastern background, and by changing the personal pronoun, enact complex and ever-changing psychological activities in modern men and women with drama and theatricality that can be fully presented on the stage. Gao Xingjian has turned invisible psychological images into visible images on the stage, and he is the first person to achieve this feat. In his play Between Life and Death, a female actor on the stage presents a lengthy soliloquy in the third person, sometimes performing, sometimes narrating to the audience. She tells of the woman’s worries, anxieties, perplexities, memories, grievances, associations, dreams, and sadness. From time to time a male clown and a female dancer take turns performing onstage. At times the clown pulls funny faces while hanging on a clothes hanger or gesticulates as if in a mime show. The other performer is sometimes a youthful woman, sometimes a ghost, and sometimes returns to being a dancer: these changes all constitute projections of her innermost feelings. When the play premiered in Paris in 1993 to a full house at the Théâtre du Rond Point, some members of the audience were moved to tears. There are five roles in the play Nocturnal Wanderer. A train passenger of undisclosed background who is reading a book enters it (or enters a dream), and the play begins. The four passengers in the same carriage separately transform into the characters of the book or dream: Wanderer, Prostitute, Hooligan, and That Character. The passenger, “you,” is the Sleepwalker. This is truly a nightmare. The character “you” in the dream is doing nothing in particular, and for no reason is time and again swept into layers of conflicts from which there is no escape, so that he descends into evil and finally is destroyed by a masked man (probably he himself). At this point, the ticket inspector from the beginning comes onstage, picks up a book from the floor, exits the stage, and the curtain falls. Throughout the entire play the dialogue is that of the pronoun “you,” and

A Panoramic View of Gao Xingjian’s World

297

as explained in the author’s suggestions for staging the play: “This play seeks to use the theatrical mode to add an annotation to some ancient topics such as God and the Devil, men and women, good and evil, saving the world and enduring hardship, the other and the self of modern human beings, consciousness and language.” Weekend Quartet has four characters. An elderly artist and his partner invite a middle-aged writer and his young girlfriend to spend the weekend in the country with them. It turns out to be boring, so there is some flirting, although nothing more happens. The four characters speak using the pronouns I, you, he or she: at times it is real conversation, at times it is soliloquy, at times it is the inner voice, and at times it becomes narration. A quartet is structured, of the characters’ perplexities and longings, anxieties and self-derision, that brilliantly present psychological activities that are difficult to articulate. In early 2003 Gao Xingjian directed the premiere performance of the play at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier of the Comédie Française. The Télérama review appearing within days stated that philosophy and lyrical poetry had been transformed into theater, and that Ionesco and Beckett had been effectively combined into an extraordinary work. In The Man Who Questions Death, an elderly This Man wanders into an empty contemporary art museum and unexpectedly is locked inside. He makes a show of mocking contemporary art, then proceeds to mock present-day politics and society. That Man appears onstage and addresses him with the second person pronoun “you,” even though he in fact is a projection of This Man’s inner mind. At this point This Man reviews his life, delving deeper and deeper, searching for the ultimate meaning of life, and finally hanging himself. This is undeniably black humor taken to the extreme. Gao Xingjian codirected the premiere performance of the play in 2003 at Théâtre du Gymnase in Marseille to a packed house. Song of the Night is a play written for performance as dance theater, and is narrated in the third person “she” by a female performer in the dance that threads through the play. The two dancers, Vivacious Dancer and

298

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Melancholy Dancer, together with the female performer form a composite image of the feminine: She. A male musician does not speak throughout, but through music and performance provides male accompaniment. The play with what can be regarded as a feminist declaration would best be thought of as the voice from the hearts of women: it is contemporary women speaking out. In Gao’s plays women generally occupy a dominant position; from Escape, Dialogue and Rebuttal, Between Life and Death, and Weekend Quartet to Song of the Night, the voice of women becomes increasingly pronounced, and moreover totally overthrows the prevalent discourse of male–female gender politics. Gao tells of women’s thoughts and feelings, and the whole play presents new thoughts about life and society. From Dialogue and Rebuttal to the five plays written in French, Gao Xingjian uses historical epic, romance, fable, social life, and politics to plumb the mysterious and subtle inner world of humans. First, by changing the personal pronoun of the subject, he created a distance that allowed for scrutiny of the subjective self. Next, his discovery of the tripartite nature of performance and establishment of the theory of the neutral actor offered new references for stage performance. In creating the changing pronoun performance technique, he took a step further than Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994) and Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) by introducing the absurdities of reality and strong philosophical thinking into modern plays, and also the subtleties of psychological activities that are difficult to clearly describe. The ephemeral transformations of the human inner mind are hard to depict even in fiction, but through this theater technique Gao Xingjian succeeds in presenting these, and moreover can instantly halt them, so that the actor can freely leap out of a character’s mind and from the side effectively discuss, critique, tease, as well as communicate and enjoy with the audience. These techniques have all been discussed fully in his works The Aesthetics of Creation and On Drama. Moreover, his opera Snow in August is a testimony to his theories about the neutral actor and tripartite

A Panoramic View of Gao Xingjian’s World

299

performance, as well as omnipotent performers and omnipotent theater. The making and staging of Snow in August indicate that he is not merely a playwright and drama theorist but one who actualizes his ideas in practice, and that he is an exceptionally talented director. In December 2002 he directed the Chinese premiere performance in Taipei, having trained fifty local Peking Opera performers in modern dance and Western vocal singing, so that on the same stage there was loud chanting, martial arts, magic, and acrobatics, as well as Western vocal singing in solo, duet, and choir. Including the symphony orchestra, onstage and in the orchestra pit there was a total of 250 persons. In 2005, I saw the grandeur of the French premiere of Snow in August at Opéra de Marseille, and witnessed the appreciative and long-lasting applause of the audience. Gao Xingjian had invited composer Xu Shuya4 to write the music, and it is truly magnificent. Marc Trautmann, who conducted, states that Xu and Gao created a new form of opera, referring to Snow in August as being comparable to the operas Woyzeck and Pelléas and Mélisande, which had been revolutionary in a different era.5 Snow in August portrays the life of Huineng, Sixth Patriarch of Chan Buddhism, and in keeping with one aspect of Gao’s assessment, the Sixth Patriarch is presented as a thinker. Although Huineng was a religious leader, he refused to worship idols. For freedom, he put no value on wearing a gown of authority or lofty titles such as “kingly leader.” Particularly startling is that before departing the world, without saying a word he cast his cassock into the fire, according to Gao Xingjian’s awesome writing. Afterward his staff fell to the floor and he peacefully died without a fuss in a seated position. Gao Xingjian’s description of this great thinker is unadorned and incisive. Following Gao Xingjian’s being awarded the Nobel Prize, the City of Marseille designated 2003 as Gao Xingjian Year and organized a grand art program that would include a major painting exhibition, an opera, a new play, and a conference. The Man Who Questions Death and Snow in August were both in the program, and Gao Xingjian would finally realize

300

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

his dream of staging a grand-scale opera. Back in the late 1980s when dancer Jiang Qing commissioned him to rewrite Splitting the Coffin for a dance piece, he happened to be thinking of writing a large-scale opera. Jiang Qing used his City of the Dead for the dance that she wrote and directed at the premiere performance by the Hong Kong Dance Company in 1988. More than a decade later, in 2011, City of the Dead was staged in a small theatre as part of the Gao Xingjian Theatre Festival in Seoul, and in February 2012, it was transformed into a grand opera staged fourteen times to audiences filling Seoul’s 540-seat Daehangno Arts Theatre.6 Gao Xingjian had yet another dream, to make the films that he himself wanted to make. This dream too was finally realized. With digital film and television help from Alain Melka and Jean-Louis Darmyn from Marseille, he produced his first cine-poem, Silhouette/Shadow (2007). While still in China, Gao published his first film script, Huadou (1985), which at the time had no prospect of being filmed. Afterward a German filmmaker showed some interest but found the ideas Gao proceeded to outline unacceptable. Gao therefore transformed his ideas into fiction and published it as “Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather” (1986), later used as the title of his short story collection published in 1989. After taking up residence in France, he also had discussions with a filmmaker, but what he had in mind did not fit the general pattern for a commercial film. So he had no choice but to turn his ideas into the short story “In an Instant” (1991). His short story “Huadou” (1982) tells of an aging hydraulic engineer who is home on sick leave. It is raining, and as he looks out the window the sound of a piano upstairs provokes thoughts about the love of his youth, and recollections surge up. Gao Xingjian turned it into a film script, written in three parallel columns for filming and editing. One column is visual images, another is utterings of the inner mind, and the third is at times the sound of rain, and at times a piano and other sounds. This pioneering film script was published in Ugly Duckling 1

A Panoramic View of Gao Xingjian’s World

301

and 2 (1985), a literary magazine established by young colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where I was working. In the film script Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, a fishing rod evokes memories of the narrator’s deceased grandfather while the television in the room is broadcasting the decisive World Cup match between Germany and Brazil, which weaves through his thoughts that are like flowing sand. In the film script In an Instant, a man is reclining in a deck chair, but it is unclear whether he is reading or lost in thought. Impressions and associations crash chaotically: paintings appear one after another; a huge wet iron door streaked with rust suddenly becomes tall skyscrapers; the back of a woman at dusk shows she has put on a coat to go out; the tide surges onto the sand; ants crawl on a naked arm; sea gulls circle in the sky. The associations among these images are indefinite, allowing space for reflection. The film Silhouette/Shadow makes full use of the large artworks created for the Gao Xingjian Year in Marseille as backdrops. It also happened to be created when digital film began, which made it possible for him to produce this noncommercial film. He wrote in French a poem called “The Way of the Wandering Bird,”7 which flows through this cine-poem that is a clear break from any established mode of modern film. This mode without narrative episodes or narrative shots is filmmaking with the freedom of writing a poem, something Gao had dreamed about as a youth. He had just started undergraduate studies when he read an essay about montage by Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). This Russian founder of film art maintained that when shots with different temporal and spatial settings were juxtaposed, new meanings were created. This was when film started to change into art because of new technological discoveries. Gao’s interest was aroused, and he wrote an even earlier film script. However, during that terrifying period of the Cultural Revolution when Red Guards searched people’s homes and destroyed anything representing old culture and old thinking, he was so frightened that he secretly burned all his

302

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

diaries, notes, old family photographs, and handwritten manuscripts. His novel One Man’s Bible is testimony to those times. Gao Xingjian has researched and deeply pondered cinematic art over a long period, and has expressed his ideas in essays collected in The Aesthetics of Creation, as well as in subsequent essays on film art. What he calls tripartite film refers to painting, sound, and language each being relatively autonomous, or responding to or forming contrasts with one another and forming the basic structure of the film; this was finally realized in Silhouette/Shadow. The film weaves together completed works, memories, associations, figments of the imagination, dreams, and hallucinations with on-site footage of activities shot during the Gao Xingjian Year in Marseille—of him painting, at a play rehearsal, filming, and attending his painting exhibition. In addition, the sound of the lines of a poem being read threads through the film. It could be said that it goes even further than the poetry of film art of Andrei Tarkovski (1932–1986) and Wim Wenders (b. 1945) and of course could not be accommodated by commercial theaters, and was even rejected by some film festivals. However, it has been screened at many art museums and international arts festivals. His second film, After the Flood (2008), was sponsored by Circulo de Lectores, Barcelona. Three dancers and three actors were filmed in his Paris studio against the backdrop of his ink paintings projected onto a specially installed large screen. Under his directorship the participants performed to the utmost of their abilities. Leading the group was a Japanese dancer, and the background was Gao’s painting End of the World (2006). When the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami occurred, the televised scenes of black howling seas filling the sky seemed to verify his film. At the end of the black-and-white film, echoing the six messengers in the wind and snow of the background painting, the bodies of the performers slowly regain some warmth and color. When it was screened in the library of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, some members of the audience said they found it a harrowing experience.

A Panoramic View of Gao Xingjian’s World

303

His most recent film, Requiem for Beauty, was sponsored by Reverie Foundation of Hong Kong and runs for two hours. It is based on a long poem he had written with the same name, and with the film in mind. Although parts of the poem were used in the film, it largely dissolved into camera shots containing no language. The poem has been published in his poetry collection Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts (2012), and could be regarded as a critique of the reality of contemporary society. Forty European, Asian, North and South American, and North African performers and dancers, including contortionists and performance vocalists, gathered in his Paris studio for separate practice and filming. This was done without a single real scene. Behind them were only images projected onto a screen. The background was simple, but the scope of the contents was breathtaking: from New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Seoul to London, Berlin, Rome, Venice, and Copenhagen, and from the subterranean crypts of Paris to the tombs of medieval churches in Spain, to the ancient ruins of Italy and the desolate beaches and barren peaks of Northern Ireland. It was a total of seven years from the earliest shots at the Carnival of Venice to when the film was completed. The film starts with the performers at rehearsal, and the actor in the role of the poet arriving late and announcing: “Beauty is dead.” At the end, with the funeral of Venus, Goddess of Beauty, the world is blanched of color, and the shots revert to black and white. The film portrays the world in modern times: the noisy clamor of politics, the overflowing flood of the market, the destruction of the ecosystem, and rampant human lust. In the film, the performers in turn play the roles of Venus, Madonna, Hamlet, Don Quixote, the modern young woman Lolita, God, the Devil and demons, the poet, the thinker, and all sorts of other people. National Taiwan Normal University published an exquisite collection of essays about the film by French academics and film practitioners, in French, Chinese, and English editions.8 While mourning the loss of beauty, Gao Xingjian simultaneously calls for a renaissance in literature and the arts. In recent years this has been the main topic of his many lectures on university campuses and at conferences extending from

304

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to Spain, Italy, England, and France. His essays “Calling for a Renaissance in Literature and the Arts” (2014) and “Transboundary Creations” (2016) outline a schedule for achieving this. His novel Soul Mountain has been published in three different Arabic translations, as well as three different Persian translations and two different Portuguese translations. It has been published in major languages such as English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Japanese, and also in minor languages such as Lithuanian, Serbian, Catalan, and even Celtic Breton, the language of Brittany. His works exist in forty different languages. Soul Mountain is recognized as part of the canon of contemporary world literature. The spiritual journey of this novel in the intellectually and spiritually impoverished present time is profoundly edifying. Setting off with the anxieties of real life, the protagonist in the eightyone chapters of Soul Mountain enters tribal nationality territories and primitive forests in frontier regions to trace the origins of ancient antiquity’s myths and cultural artifacts, probing the depths and soul of the consciousness, borrowing the flow of language to awaken human awareness and to reflect on his own existence. His other novel, One Man’s Bible, tells of China’s Cultural Revolution, a catastrophe in modern human history of proportions comparable to that wrought by the Nazis. However, with the passage of time, those events are now virtually forgotten. The author unstintingly retrieves his own personal experiences to describe absolute dictatorship, mass violence, and human weakness with penetrative depth that far surpasses conventional “scar literature” or exposés and complaints by those with different political views. This novel is an extraordinary masterpiece. Apart from creating works of fiction, plays, and films, Gao Xingjian also enjoys international acclaim as a distinguished painter who has held close to a hundred solo exhibitions in Asia, Europe, and the United States and published more than thirty books on his paintings. A number of art museums have held large retrospective exhibitions of his works. During the 2001 Avignon Theatre Festival in France, his plays Between Life and

A Panoramic View of Gao Xingjian’s World

305

Death and Dialogue and Rebuttal were staged. Also, in the Palais des Papes in Avignon a large-scale retrospective exhibition of his ink paintings was held, for which a magnificent art catalogue titled Another Kind of Aesthetics was published in both Chinese and French editions, and then followed by Italian and English editions.9 In 2003 a large exhibition of his new paintings was held at the Musée de la Vieille Charité. For the two specially designed black and white exhibition halls, he created a series of large works 2.5 meters in height, so that the seventeen large paintings totaled 60 meters in length; afterward he donated all of these to the City of Marseille. The museum had an old church, and after enlarged replicas of his paintings were framed, they were fitted into the eight arches. The one directly over the altar stood more than 5 meters in height, and the cross in the painting resembled the image of a bird and also a person: it was a symbol of sacrifice. A specially designed art catalogue was produced with the title Wandering Freely Like a Bird. Art museums from Taiwan, Singapore, Germany, Spain, and Portugal organized large exhibitions in succession, and art books were produced. His large solo exhibitions in Spain and Portugal were followed by two momentous events in Brussels. His exhibition at the Museum of Ixelles (February 26 to May 31, 2015) was to date his largest retrospective, and was launched the day after the formal opening of his permanent exhibition in a dedicated hall at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. His paintings open a new road for Chinese ink painting, and moreover point to a new way with prospects for overcoming the weariness of Western contemporary art. He has demonstrated that between the figurative and the abstract is an inexhaustible stream of mental images, and in so doing he has written a new page in the history of art. In recent years several important studies on his art have been published; important among them is Daniel Bergez’s Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul.10 Gao Xingjian’s achievements in several creative areas are concrete as well as substantial: he is a multitalented artist of a caliber seldom found today. That he has won international acclaim in disparate fields deserves further research. The full spectrum of his creative endeavors has been

306

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

surveyed in the above to discover what dominant ideas and unusual modes of thinking lie behind his flourishes of creativity. He is undoubtedly a thinker, but he takes a position that is clearly located outside the discipline of philosophy. Yet philosophy can be said to permeate his creations in various fields, as noted by eminent philosopher, academic, and historian of philosophy and art aesthetics Jean-Pierre Zarader. Translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee

A Panoramic View of Gao Xingjian’s World

307

Notes 1. Chinese edition, Taipei: Lianjing, 2001. An English version is contained in Gao Xingjian, Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2012), 89–158. 2. This is based on my speech presented at the Gao Xingjian Conference, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, May 22, 2017. 3. In Gao Xingjian, Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts (Taipei: Lianjing, 2012), 89–132. 4. Born in China in 1961, Xu Shuya relocated to Paris from Shanghai in 1988 and quickly excelled in his profession in Europe. He is currently the director of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. 5. Woyzeck (premiere, 1925) is the work of Austrian composer Alban Berg (1885–1935), and Pelléas and Mélisande (premiere 1902) is the work of French composer Claude Debussy (1862–1918). See Marc Trautmann, “Le Premier grand opéra chinois vu par son chef d’orchestre français,” in Xu Shuya, Na Neige en août (Paris: Actes Sud, 2002), 26. 6. Sookyung Oh is professor of theater studies at Hanyang University, Seoul. She has translated several of Gao Xingjian’s plays into Korean, including City of the Dead, and was instrumental in bringing this play to Seoul. See also Sookyung Oh, “Tradition and Freedom: The Artistic World of Gao Xingjian and His Play Hades,” in Freedom and Fate in Gao Xingjian’s Writings, ed. Michael Lackner and Nikola Chardonnens (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 149–169. 7. Translated from the French by Ned Burgess and Fiona Sze-Lorrain, in Fiona Sze-Lorrain, ed., Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian (Paris: Contours, 2007), 47–64. 8. Gao Xingjian, Requiem for Beauty (Taipei: National Taiwan Normal University, 2016). 9. Noël and Liliane Dutrait’s French translation from the Chinese was used as the basis for the slightly abridged English edition titled Gao Xingjian, Return to Painting, trans. Nadia Benabid (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). Mabel Lee’s full translation of Gao’s lengthy treatise, titled “Another Kind of Aesthetics,” is included in Gao’s Aesthetics and Creation (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012). 10. London: Asia Ink, 2013. Translated from the French edition published in the same year.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia. Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1974. Adorno, Theodor W. “Valéry Proust Museum.” In Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Appia, Adolphe. “Ideas on a Reform of Our Mise-en-scène.” In Adolphe Appia: Texts on Theatre, edited by Richard C. Beacham, 59-65. London: Routledge, 1993. Aristotle. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. Trans. S.H. Butcher. New York: Dover, 1951. Arons, Wendy, and Theresa J. May, eds. Readings in Performance and Ecology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Aronson, Arnold. “The Dematerialization of the Stage.” In The Disappearing Stage: Reflections on the 2011 Prague Quadrennial, edited by Arnold Aronson. Prague: Arts and Theatre Institute, Prague Quadrennial, 2012. ———. Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Artaud, A. The Theatre and Its Double. London: John Calder Ltd., 1958. Bachelard, Gaston. “The Dialectics of Outside and Inside.” In The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas, 211-231. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Bai, Ronnie. “Dances with Brecht: Huang Zuolin and His ‘Xieyi’ Theater.” Comparative Drama 33, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 339-364. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

310

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

———. Rabelais and His World. Translated by H. Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Ballade nocturne (Théâtre musical), Dossier, SourouS Compagnie, 2010. Accessed January 10, 2016. http://www.sourous-compagnie.com/ IMG/pdf/DOSSIER_CREATION_-Ballade_pdf. Barba, Eugenio. The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology. Translated by Richard Fowler. London: Routledge, 1996. Barthes, Roland. “The Photographic Message.” In Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. Baudelaire, Charles. “Preface to La Presse, 1862.” In The Parisian Prowler, trans. Edward K. Kaplan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulation.” In Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? vol. 1. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2005. Beauclair, Michelle. Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras, and the Legacy of Mourning. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Bergez, Daniel. Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul. Translated by Sherry Buchanan. London: Asia Ink, 2013. ———. Gao Xingjian: peintre de l’âme. Paris: Seuil, 2013. Bleeker, M. “Look Who’s Looking!: Perspective and the Paradox of Postdramatic Subjectivity.” Theatre Research International 1 (March 2004): 29–41. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Brison, Susan. “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self.” In Acts of Memory, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, 40-48. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Cahill, James. Three Alternative Histories of Chinese Painting. Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1988.

Bibliography

311

Cairns, Adrian. “Zen and the Art of Acting.” New Theatre Quarterly 2 (1986). Camus, Albert. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Edited by Philip Thody. Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Vintage, 1970. ———. “The Myth of Sisyphus.” In The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Knopf, 1955. Chang Chen-yu. Ink Paintings by Gao Xingjian. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1995. ———. “The Stream of Time: Preface to the Gao Xingjian Exhibition.” In Ink Paintings by Gao Xingjian. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1995. Chen Jide. Contemporary Chinese Avant-garde Theatre 1979–2000 (Zhongguo dangdai xianfeng xiju, 1979–2000). Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2003. Chevrier, Jean-Francois. “The Reality of Hallucination in André Bazin.” In Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, edited by Dudley Andrew and Herve Joubert-Laurencin, 42-56. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Chou Mei-huei. Chan Thoughts in Snow: Notes form the Rehearsal of Snow in August Directed by Gao Xingjian (Xuedi chan si: Gao Xingjian zhidao Bayue xue xianchang biji). Taipei: Linking, 2002. Coleman, Ewan. “Theatre Review: Asian Play Resonates with New Zealand Audiences.” Dominion Post (Wellington, NZ), May 23, 2014. Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Edited by Douglas Keller. New York: Routledge, 2011. Conceison, Claire. “The French Gao Xingjian, Bilingualism, and Ballade Nocturne.” Hong Kong Drama Review 8 (2009): 303–322. Copeau, Jacques, and Claude Sicard. Registres, VI, L’école du Vieux-Colombier. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. Coulter, T. Transcultural Aesthetics in the Plays of Gao Xingjian. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. Dardé, Corinne, dir. Gao Xingjian Portrait. Vimeo.com. Accessed January 20, 2018. https://vimeo.com/130184886.

312

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Mike Taormina. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004. Diderot, Denis, and Walter Herries Pollock. The Paradox of Acting. Translated from Denis Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comedien. London: Chatto & Windus, 1883. Draguet, Michel. Gao Xingjian: le goût de l’encre. Paris: Hazan, 2002; 2015. ———. “Les pas perdus de Gao Xingjian.” Esprit libre 9 (2003). Dutrait, Noël. “The Birth of an Opera in Chinese––Gao Xingjian’s Snow in August” (Yibu Zhongwen geju de dansheng––Gao Xingjian de Bayue xue). Translated by Pan Xinghui. Mingbao yuekan 38, no. 6 (T: 450) (2003): 40–42. ———. “L’œuvre de Gao Xingjian: un essai d’analyse global.” In L’écriture romanesque et théâtrale de Gao Xingjian. Paris: Seuil, 2006. Eddershaw, Margaret. Performing Brecht: Forty Years of British Performances. London: Routledge, 1996. Eder, Rischard. “Books of the Times: A Dreamlike Chinese Journey Haunted by Past and Present.” Review of Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian. New York Times, December 18, 2000. Eldredge, Sears A., and Hollis W. Huston. “Actor Training in the Neutral Mask.” The Drama Review 22, no. 4 (1978). Evans, Megan. “Chinese ‘Xiqu’ Performance and Moving-Image Media.” Theatre Research International 34, no. 1 (2009): 26–27. Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage, 1990. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. “Dance Tension.” In Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987. Galik, Marian. “Gao Xingjian’s Novel Lingshan (Soul Mountain): A Long Journey in Search of a Woman?” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (December 2003): 611-630.

Bibliography

313

Gao Xingjian. Aesthetics and Creation. Translated by Mabel Lee. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012. ———. After the Flood. Madrid: Circulo de Lectores, 2008. DVD. ———. Another Kind of Aesthetics (Ling yizhong meixue). Taipei: Lianjing, 2001. ———. Between Figurative and Abstract. Translated by Mabel Lee. Notre Dame, IN: Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, 2007. ———. “Between Homeland and Heartland.” Lecture presented at the University of Notre Dame, September 2007. ———. Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather. Translated by Mabel Lee. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. ———. “The Case for Literature.” Translated by Mabel Lee. PMLA 116, no. 3 (May 2001): 594–608. ———. The Case for Literature (Wenxue de liyou). Hong Kong: Cosmo Books, 2001. ———. The Case for Literature. Translated by Mabel Lee. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. ———. City of the Dead and Song of the Night. Translated by Gilbert C. F. Fong and Mabel Lee. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2015. ———. Cold Literature: Selected Works by Gao Xingjian. Translated by Gilbert C. F. Fong and Mabel Lee. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005. ———. De la creation. Translated by Noël Dutrait. Paris: Seuil, 2013. ———. Depois do dilúvio. Barcelona: El Cobre Ediciones, 2009. ———. Escape and The Man Who Questions Death. Translated by Gilbert C.F. Fong. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2007. ———. Esprit errant pensée méditative. Translated by Noël Dutrait. Paris: Caractères, 2016. ———. Freedom and Literature (Ziyou yu wenxue). Taibei Shi: Lianjing chuban shiye gufen youxian gongsi, 2014.

314

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

———. Gao Xingjian: Pizkunderako deia Llamada a un Renacimiento. Donostia/San Sebastian: Sala Kubo-kutxa Aretoa, 2016. ———. La Fin du monde. Koblenz: Kerber, 2007. ———. La Montagne de l’âme. Translated by Noël Dutrait and Liliane Dutrait. Paris: Point, 2007. ———. Le deuil de la beauté. Translated by Noël Dutrait. Luxembourg: Galerie Simoncini Editeur, 2012. ———. Le livre d’un homme seul. Translated by Noël Dutrait and Liliane Dutrait. Paris: Point, 2008. ———. Le Neige en Août [Snow in August]. Arles: Actes Sud. 2005. ———. “Literary Conversation with Julia Alvarez and Gao Xingjian.” Interviews conducted by Maria Rosa Olivera-Williams and Mabel Lee. English-Chinese translation by Jonathan Noble. “Between Homeland and Heartland,” University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, September 10–13, 2007. ———. Nocturnal Wanderer (Yeyou shen). Taibei: Lianhe wenxue chuban she, 2001. ———. Nouvelles œuvres. Paris: Galerie Claude Bernard, 2014. ———. Of Mountains and Seas: A Tragicomedy of the Gods in Three Acts. Translated by Gilbert C.F. Fong. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2008. ———. One Man’s Bible. Translated by Mabel Lee. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. ———. The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian. Translated by Gilbert C. F. Fong. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1999. ———. Quatre quatuors pour un week-end. Carnières-Morlanwelz, Belgium: Lansman, 1999. ———. Return to Painting. Translated by Nadia Benabid. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. ———. Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian. Translated by Mabel Lee. Edited by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Paris: Contours, 2007.

Bibliography

315

———. Snow in August: A Music-drama, in Three Acts and Eight Scenes (Bayue xue: San mu ba chang xiandai xiqu). Taipei: Linking, 2000. ———. Snow in August: An Opera, in Three Acts and Nine Scenes (Bayue xue: San mu jiu chang geju). Directed by Gao Xingjian and Tsao FuYung. Taipei: Council for Cultural Affairs, 2002. ———. Soul Mountain (Lingshan). Taipei: Lianjing, 1990. ———. Soul Mountain. Translated by Mabel Lee. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. Soul Mountain. Translated by Mabel Lee. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. ———. Soul Mountain. Translated by Mabel Lee. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2001. ———. Snow in August. Translated by Gilbert C. F. Fong. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. ———. “Thoughts on Painting.” In Chang Chen-yu, Ink Paintings by Gao Xingjian. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1995. ———. Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts: Collected Poems of Gao Xingjian (Youshen yu xuansi: Gao Xingjian shiji). Taibei Shi: Lianking chuban shiye gufen youxian gongsi, 2012. ———. “Wild Man: A Contemporary Chinese Spoken Drama.” Translated with an introduction by Bruno Roubicek. Asian Theatre Journal 7, no. 2 (Autumn 1990): 184–249. ———. Without Isms (Meiyou zhuyi). Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 1996. ———. Without Isms (Meiyou zhuyi). Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu youxian gongsi, 2000. Gao Xingjian and Fang Zixun. On Drama (Lun xiju). Taipei: Lianjing, 2010. Gianetti, Louis. Understanding Movies. 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2008. Gide, André. The Fruits of the Earth. Middlesex: Penguin, 1970. Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. Edited by Eugenio Barba. New York: Routledge, 2002.

316

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Hsia, C. T. A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. 3rd ed. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. Huang, Alexander C. Y. Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. ———. “The Theatricality of Religious Rhetoric: Gao Xingjian and the Meaning of Exile.” Theatre Journal 63, no. 3 (October 2011): 365-379. Huang Zuolin. “Mei Lanfang, Stanislavski and Brecht—A Study in Contrasts.” In Peking Opera and Mei Lanfang: A Guide to China’s Traditional Theatre and the Arts of Its Great Master, edited by Wu Zuguang, Huang Zuolin, and Mei Shaowu, 14-29. Beijing: New World Press, 1981. Innes, C. Avant Garde Theatre: 1892–1992. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Ivakhiv, Adrian J. Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. ———. “Nature’s Nation: Improvisation, Democracy, and Ken Burns’ National Parks.” Environmental Communication 4, no. 4 (December 2010): 462-68. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2010.522141. Jaggard, D. Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition. Edited by Paul Bishop. Suffolk: Camden House, 2004. Jameson, Frederic. Brecht and Method. London: Verso, 2000. Kettler, David, and Gerhard Lauer, eds. Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Émigré Intellectuals. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Kong, Belinda. Tian’anmen Fictions: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. Kuo, Jason C. The Inner Landscape: The Paintings of Gao Xingjian. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2013. Kuritz, Paul. The Making of Theatre History. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988.

Bibliography

317

Łabędzka, Izabella. Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre: From the Word to the Image. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2008. LaCapra, Dominick. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. New York: Cornell University Press, 1994. ———. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Lackner, Michael, and Nikola Chardonnens, eds. Polyphony Embodied: Freedom and Fate in Gao Xingjian’s Writings. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. Laozi. Dao De jing: The Book of the Way. Translated by Moss Roberts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Lee, Edmund. “Interview: Gao Xingjian.” TimeOut, April 28, 2010. http://timeout-admin-node1.candrholdings.com/art/features/33942/ interview-gao-xingjian.html. Lee, Mabel. “Contextualizing Gao Xingjian’s Film Silhouette/Shadow.” MCLC Resource Center Newsletter, January 2008. http://mclc.osu. edu/rc/pubs/lee.htm ———. “Gao Xingjian’s Transcultural Aesthetics in Fiction, Theater, Art, and Film.” In Polyphony Embodied: Freedom and Fate in Gao Xingjian’s Writings, edited by Michael Lackner and Nikola Chardonnens, 19-42. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2014. ———. “Introduction: Gao Xingjian: Autobiography and the Portrayal of the Female Psyche.” In Gao Xingjian, City of the Dead and Song of the Night, translated by Gilbert C.F. Fong and Mabel Lee, vii-xxiii. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2015. ———. “Question and Answer. Contextualizing Gao Xingjian’s Film Silhouette/Shadow.” Lecture at Gao Xingjian, “Between Homeland and Heartland,” University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, September 10–13, 2007. Lehmann, H.-T. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Li Zehou. The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition. Translated by Maija Bell Samei. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010.

318

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Lim Wah Guan (Lin Huayuan). “On the Margins of East and West” (Chuyu dongxi wenhua de bianyuan). Hong Kong Drama Review (Xianggang xiju xuekan) 8 (September 2009): 163–182. Liu Jianmei. “Gao Xingjian’s Theatrical Portrayals of the Female Psyche: a Review of City of the Dead and Song of the Night by Gao Xingjian, translated by Gilbert C. F. Fong and Mabel Lee.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center, January 2015. http://u.osu. edu/mclc/book-reviews/liujianmei/. ———. Zhuangzi and Modern Chinese Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Liu Siyuan. “The Cross Currents of Modern Theatre and China’s National Theatre Movement of 1925-1926.” Asian Theatre Journal 33, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 1-35. Liu Zaifu. Gao Xingjian: Introductions and Prefaces (Gao Xingjian yinlun). Hong Kong: Great Mountain Culture, 2011. ———. On Gao Xingjian’s Stance (Lun Gao Xingjian zhuangtai). Hong Kong: Ming pao, 2000. ———. On Gao Xingjian (Gao Xingjian lun). Taipei: Lianjing, 2004. ———. On Gao Xingjian Again (Zailun Gao Xingjian). Taipei: Lianjing, 2016. ———, ed. Reading Gao Xingjian (Du Gao Xingjian). Hong Kong: Great Mountain Culture, 2013. Louie, Kam. “Review: In Search of the Chinese Soul in the Mountains of the South.” The China Journal 45 (2001): 145-149. Lu Ji. The Art of Writing. Translated by Shih-Hsiang Chen and Sam Hamill. Accessed July 26, 2016. http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/web %20publishing/LuChi.htm. Lucey, Michael. Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Malraux, André. “Museum without Walls.” In The Voices of Silence, translated by Stuart Gilbert. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.

Bibliography

319

March, Benjamin. “A Note on Perspective in Chinese Painting.” The China Journal 7, no. 2 (August 1927): 69-72. Mazzilli, Mary. Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays. London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015. ———. “Gender in Gao Xingjian’s Between Life and Death: The Notion of Originary Self and the Use of Tripartition.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, no. 3 (2015): 369-394. McConachie, Bruce. “Theorizing Eco-Performance: Ethics, Evolution, Ecology, and Performance.” In Readings in Performance and Ecology, edited by Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Middeke, M., and Christina Wald. The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Murray, Simon. Jacques Lecoq. New York: Routledge, 2003. “Neutral Mask.” CITA/International Centre for Theatre Arts. Accessed February 23, 2017. http://internationalcita.com/neutral-mask/. Oh Sookyung. “Tradition and Freedom: The Artistic World of Gao Xingjian and His Play Hades.” In Freedom and Fate in Gao Xingjian’s Writings, edited by Michael Lackner and Nikola Chardonnens. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2014. Oliva, Gaeteno. “Education to Theatricality and Neutral Mask: PsychoPedagogical Approach.” Creative Education 7 (2016). http://file.scirp. org/pdf/CE_2016072718361238.pdf. Pavis, Patrice. “Introduction: Towards a Theory of Interculturalism in Theatre?” In The Intercultural Performance Reader, edited by Patrice Pavis, 1-21. London: Routledge, 1996. Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. London: Penguin Classics, 2002. Plato. The Symposium. Translated by Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Qian Zhongshu. The Besieged City (Weicheng). Shanghai: Chengguang chuban gongsi, 1947.

320

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Quah Sy Ren. Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004. Rojas, Carlos. “Without [Femin]ism: Femininity as Axis of Alterity and Desire in Gao Xingjian’s One Man’s Bible.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14, no. 2 (2002): 163-206. Roubicek, Bruno. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Gao Xingjian, “Wild Man: A Contemporary Chinese Spoken Drama.” Asian Theater Journal 7, no. 2 (Autumn 1990): 184–191. Savage, Catharene Hill. “Les Nourritures Terrestres and Also Sprach Zarathustra.” The South Central Bulletin 21, no. 4 (1961): 51–55. Segalen, Victor. Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity. Edited and translated by Yaël Rachel Schlick. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Seto Lap. Journey Through Darkness and the Beauty of Darkness—On the Painting of Gao Xingjian.” In Ink Paintings by Gao Xingjian, edited by Chang Chen-yu, 14-17. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1995. Shum, Janet. “Diasporic Aesthetics of Gao Xingjian’s Exilic Discourse.” PhD diss., Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2010. Siggstedt, Mette. “From This Reality to Another World.” Translated by Chang Mai-Ping. In Ink Paintings by Gao Xingjian, edited by Chang Chen-yu, 9-10. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1995. Sirén, Osvald. Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles. Vol. V. The Late Ming and Leading Ch‘ing Masters. New York: Ronald Press, 1956. Song Yong-Yi, ed. The Cultural Revolution: Historical Truth and Collective Memories. Hong Kong: Tianyuan shuwu, 2007. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.Spoto, Estelle. “The inner visions of Gao Xingjian.” Bruzz, February 25, 2015. http://www.bruzz.be/en/expo/inner-visions-gaoxingjian. Strich, Fritz. Goethe and World Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949.

Bibliography

321

Sullivan, Michael. The Solitary World of Gao Xingjian. Hong Kong: Alisan Fine Arts, 2001. Sze-Lorrain, Fiona, ed. Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian. Paris: Contours, 2007. Tam Kwok-kan, ed. Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001. Tam, Kwok-kan, Terry Siu-han Yip, and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. A Place of One’s Own: Stories of Self in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Hong Kong and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Tomaides, Petr and tomato22.net. Gao Xingjian—Mystical Introduction. Tomato22 Dreamin’ Pictures. Accessed January 20, 2018. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhe4evIn-0s. Turner, Matthew. “Classical Chinese Landscape Painting and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 43, no. 1 (2009): 106-121. Wallis, Mick, and Simon Shepherd. Studying Plays. London; New York: Arnold, 2002. Wang, Eugene Y. “The Winking Owl: Visual Effect and Its Art Historical Thick Description.” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 435-473. Wang Ke-Ming, and Xiao-Ming Song, eds. We Confess. Hong Kong: Great Mountain Culture, 2014. Wang Meng. “Eyes of the Night” (Ye de yan). English translation by Donald A. Gibbs. Original work published in Bright Daily (Guangming ribao), 1979. Wei Ling-Dun. One Gives Birth to Two, Two Gives Birth to Three: Research on Gao Xingjian’s Fiction. Hong Kong: Cosmos, 2013. Wichmann, Elizabeth. Listening to Theatre: The Aural Dimension of Beijing Opera. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. Worthen, W. B., comp. The Harcourt Brace Anthology of Drama. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 2000.

322

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Xu, Gang Gary. “My Writing, Your Pain, and Her Trauma: Pronouns and (Gendered) Subjectivity in Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14, no. 2 (2002): 99-129. Yan Haiping. “Theatricality in Classical Chinese Drama.” In Theatricality, edited by Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, 65-89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Yang Xiao-Bin. The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Yang Yongmiao. “The Artistic Circles Meditate on Snow in August Together: Gao Xingjian Challenges the Impossible” (Yishujie gongxiu Bayue xue: Gao Xingjian tiaozhan bukeneng). Yuanjian zazhi 198 (2002): 170–172. Yeung, Jessica. Ink Dances in Limbo: Gao Xingjian’s Writing as Cultural Translation. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. Zhang Xianliang. Half of Man Is Woman (Nanren de yiban shi nüren). Taipei: Wenjing chubanshe youxian gongsi, 1987. ———. Half of Man Is Woman. Translated by Martha Avery. New York: Norton, 1988. Zhao, Henry Y.H. Towards a Modern Zen Theatre: Gao Xingjian and Chinese Theatre Experimentalism. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2000. Zong Baihua. Aesthetic Ramblings (Meixue sanbu). Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1981. Zou Jiping. “Gao Xingjian and Chinese Experimental Theatre.” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994.

Index

Absolute Signal, 4, 201–202, 294 absurdist play, 9, 293 acrobatics, 8, 119, 170, 173, 299 actor-centered theory, 108 actor–commentator, 203 actor-self, 204 adequately scripted character, 202 Adorno, Theodor W., 222, 227, 245, 256, 258 aesthetics, 5, 7, 9–12, 14–16, 19, 26–27, 31, 38–39, 41–42, 45, 49–50, 52, 55–56, 62–64, 66, 69, 73–75, 78–81, 92–93, 95, 106, 129, 132, 134, 138, 140, 143, 165, 167, 169–171, 174, 177–178, 181–182, 184, 188, 191–192, 194, 199, 202, 205–206, 212–214, 218–219, 222–223, 226–227, 240, 248–249, 251–253, 256, 269, 271, 283, 285–286, 289–290, 294, 298, 302, 305–307, 341–343 Aesthetics and Creation, 19, 41–42, 66, 69, 74, 80, 95, 140, 167, 177, 192, 199, 213–214, 226, 271, 286, 290, 307 After the Flood, 9, 15, 37, 182–186, 188, 190–192, 195–196, 198, 202, 218, 231, 302 Ai Qing, 263–264, 274 Alarm Signal, 265 alienation, 89, 110, 197, 274 allegorical anecdotes, 82 alternative aesthetics, 202 androgynous dancer, 186, 196 Annonciation, 197

“Another Kind of Aesthetics,” 7, 19, 80, 138, 140, 167, 214, 226–227, 307 antiaesthetic politics, 12 anti-illusionism, 170 anxiety, 55–57, 62, 81, 83, 88, 91, 278 Appia, Adolphe, 176, 178 Aristotle, 226 Artaud, Antonin, 119, 128 Au fond, 151–152 audience, 16, 85, 99, 101–102, 105, 107–108, 111–112, 116–117, 119, 121, 126, 129–130, 171, 175, 183–184, 187, 189, 197, 203–204, 206, 208–209, 212, 219–223, 225, 253, 257, 264, 266–267, 271–273, 296, 298–299, 302 audio-language, 195 authenticity, 112, 134 authorial self, 15, 17, 277 authoritarianism, 75 Auspices, The, 186 autobiography, 1, 5–7, 15, 18, 94, 167, 172, 231–232 auto-fiction, 231 autonomous discipline, 23 avant-garde fiction, 258 Avery, Martha, 167 Awakening of the Consciousness, The, 14, 132, 138 Ba Jin, 3, 263, 274 backdrop, 148, 171–173, 188, 195, 218, 237, 240, 273, 302

324

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Bai, Ronnie, 129 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 80, 193 Banquet, The, 38 Barba, Eugenio, 175, 178, 214 Barthes, Roland, 198–199 Baudelaire, Charles, 223, 227 Baudrillard, Jean, 222, 226 Beckett, Samuel, 4–5, 76, 258, 293, 297–298 Benjamin, Walter, 12, 24, 28, 33, 254, 260 Benoist, Jocelyn, 39 Bergez, Daniel, 19, 135–136, 140, 149, 166, 178, 193, 243, 305 Bergman, Ingmar, 204 Bergson, Henri, 12, 24, 28–30 Berry, Michael, 16, 261, 263–264, 266, 268–269, 345 Bertomeu, Thierry, 183 Between Life and Death, 7, 47, 82–83, 85–86, 88, 94, 118, 120–121, 123, 204, 208, 295–296, 298 biji (record), 83 Bible, 1, 7, 16, 18, 23–26, 28, 31–33, 41–42, 49, 52, 58, 61, 66, 89–90, 92, 94–95, 149, 161–162, 166–167, 181, 232–233, 235, 245–249, 252, 255–260, 290, 302, 304 bildung, 258 Birth, 197, 259 black comedy, 59, 64, 297 Bleeker, Maaika, 123, 126, 129 Bluestone, George, 226 body, 8, 15, 29, 36–37, 50, 61–62, 76, 85, 100, 103, 105, 110–112, 141, 160, 171, 190, 196, 198–199, 207, 226, 231, 249–250, 256, 268, 272, 277, 280

Bonnin, Romain, 9 Book of Disquiet, The, 16, 277–279, 283, 286 Brecht and Method, 259 Brecht, Bertolt, 76, 107–108, 110, 129, 170, 177, 209, 212, 215, 258–259 Brechtian fashion, 121 bu ran (unstained), 72 Buchanan, Sherry, 140, 166, 193 Buddha, 174–175, 210, 258 Buddhism, 9, 13–14, 62, 70–71, 83, 86–87, 111, 135, 169, 172, 264, 291, 299 Burgess, Ned, 307 Burns, Ken, 184, 192 Bus Stop, 4–5, 53, 202, 210, 265–266, 294–295 Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, 6, 301 Cahill, James, 169, 177 Camus, Albert, 59, 66, 83, 280, 286 cannibalism, 187 Cao Xueqin, 74 carnivalesque way, 65 catastrophe, 15, 52, 181–182, 186, 196, 245–246, 255, 265–266, 304 catharsis, 64, 196, 252 Celestial Eye, The, 164 Chan Buddhism (Zen), 5, 9, 13–14, 62, 70–71, 82, 87, 94–95, 111, 114, 129, 135, 169–170, 172, 177, 213, 291, 299 Chan, Shelby, 13, 99, 213 Chapon, François, 136, 140 character-self, 204, 212 Chardonnens, Nikola, 75, 80, 194, 258, 307 Chen Jide, 119, 128

Index Chevrier, Jean-Francois, 129 Chinese spoken drama, 18, 192–194, 203 choral interiority, 126–127, 130 choreography, 170, 220 cinematic language, 13, 115–116, 123 cine-poem, 15, 183, 206, 217–221, 223–225, 300–301 City of the Dead, 6–7, 19, 87, 94, 128, 167, 290, 292–293, 300, 307 cold literature, 48, 64–65, 108–109, 211, 215, 283, 286 commercialization, 15, 56, 204, 217 comparative approach, 17 complete drama, 119–120 Conceison, Claire, 118, 123, 125, 128–129 Conlon, Stephen, 12, 69 contaminated self, 254 contemplative gaze, 185 contemporary legend theatre, 174 contemporary parable, 56 controlled accident, 111 conscious mind, 32 consciousness flow, 72 conventionality, 171 Copeau, Jacques, 100–101, 113, 170 cosmopolitan sensibilities, 2 Coulter, Todd, 124–125, 129 Critique of Judgment, 27 cubism, 71 cultural consumerism, 17 Cultural Revolution, 2–3, 7, 52, 90, 161, 167, 170, 211, 232, 246, 248, 254, 258, 262–263, 265–266, 270, 274, 301, 304 Curien, Annie, 234 da Vinci, Leonardo, 206 Dan Chongguang, 172

325 dance, 9, 11, 14–15, 50–51, 115, 118, 120–123, 171, 179, 191, 196–197, 199, 219, 234, 236, 272, 292, 297, 299–300, 342 dance drama (wuju), 118, 292 Dante Alighieri, 45, 74, 76, 206 Dao, 13, 71, 76, 81–85, 89, 92, 94 Dao de jing, 94 Daoism, 264 Davis, Tracy C., 177, 192 Dazzle, 173 Debussy, Claude, 307 Decline of the West, The, 33 Deleuze, Gilles, 12, 35–36, 42, 124 Delgadio, Carmela, 124 dematerialization of the stage, 172, 178 denial of cultural anchoring, 170 Descartes, René, 12, 24, 36 determinism, 11 Devant et derrière la porte, 172 devil, 207, 238–239, 297, 303 dialectics, 34, 51, 135, 199 Dialogue and Rebuttal, 7, 88, 204, 294, 298, 305 Dias, Nuno, 134, 140 diaspora, 89–91, 249 Divine Comedy, The, 76 diglossia, 74 director-playwright, 207 discursivity, 246 distance, 15–16, 23, 26, 32, 35, 37, 72, 76, 101, 103, 105–106, 108–109, 125–126, 142–143, 207–208, 212, 247, 249, 251, 283, 285, 298 distanciation, 38, 248–249, 257 Don Quixote, 207, 303 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 45, 193 drama, 10, 17–18, 66–67, 75, 99,

326

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

drama (continued), 113–115, 118–120, 128–129, 171, 174, 177, 189, 192–194, 201, 203–205, 211, 214–215, 226, 262, 274, 290, 292, 294, 296, 298–299, 341 “Dramaturgical Method and the Neutral Actor,” 214 dramaturgy, 4–6, 13, 15, 50, 115–116, 118, 121–123, 127, 170, 183, 185, 187, 189, 201–202 Dutrait, Noël, 16, 18, 210, 215, 231, 243–244 eco-performance, 192 eclecticism, 221 Eclipse, 223 eco-dramaturgy, 183 eco-ethical and spiritual concerns, 15 ecology, 192, 194 Eder, Richard, 69, 71, 78, 80 ego sum, 23, 36–37 Eisenstein, Sergei, 269, 301 emptiness, 101, 104, 111, 135, 155, 171, 177, 206, 221 End of the World, 302 enlightenment, 13, 46, 72, 74, 76, 82, 92, 135 eros, 38, 196 Escape, 7–8, 19, 41, 47, 58, 66–67, 203, 209–210, 227, 295, 298 Eternal, The, 173 ethics, 89, 187, 192, 194, 248, 293 ethnographer, 74, 76, 78 eternal present, 63 Evans, Megan, 14–15, 181, 193 evolution, 35, 133, 192, 194, 222 exhibition, 6, 9–10, 28, 56, 132–134, 136, 146, 148, 151–152, 166, 241, 256, 299, 302, 305

exile, 16, 94, 123, 128–129, 148, 166, 177, 191, 203, 211, 250, 258, 266–267, 283 existentialism, 87 existentialist dilemma, 118, 152 experimentalism, 94, 177, 213 extrahuman elements, 187–188, 190 extratheatrical reality, 127 eye of wisdom, 102, 104 farce, 49, 64 fanaticism, 283 fatalism, 65 Faulkner, William, 31 female psyche, 82, 85–86, 89, 94, 167 feminine identity, 124 femininity, 82, 84, 86, 94, 236 Feng Mu, 266, 274 fictionality, 126 film, 3, 7, 10, 15, 17, 30, 37, 44, 50, 52, 124, 129, 134, 137, 147, 181–183, 185–186, 188, 190–191, 194–198, 201–202, 204–206, 208–210, 212–214, 217–224, 226, 234, 237–238, 240, 257, 261, 269–271, 289, 291, 300–303 filmed theater, 188 Flatley, Jonathan, 259–260 fluidity, 110, 171, 280 flood, 9, 15, 37, 81, 134, 182–186, 188, 190–193, 195–199, 202, 214, 218, 231, 302–303 flow of language, 31, 50, 294, 304 Fong, Gilbert C. F., 13, 18–19, 41, 66–67, 94, 99, 128, 167, 178, 190, 194, 203, 213–215, 227, 286, 290 forest, 77, 184, 189–190 Foucault, Michel, 248, 258 frail individual, 25, 48, 50, 53, 58, 65 freedom, 9–11, 13, 16–17, 24, 26,

Index freedom (continued), 29, 33, 35, 42, 58–60, 65, 75–76, 80, 88–93, 95, 106–108, 111, 114, 135, 192, 194, 206–207, 211, 213, 215, 221, 226, 235–236, 240, 248, 253, 258, 269, 278, 285, 290, 299, 301, 307 Fruits of the Earth, The, 16, 277–278, 281, 283, 286 functional performative role, 121 Gálik, Marián, 89, 95 gender subjectivity, 86 gender/sexual opposition, 83 Gide, André, 16, 277–278, 280–284, 286 globalization, 52, 56, 206, 212, 217 God, 10, 24, 37, 47, 57–58, 162, 207, 209–210, 219, 238–239, 255, 278–279, 281–282, 290–292, 297, 303 Great Leap Forward, 274 grotesquerie, 74, 77 Grotowski, Jerzy, 204, 214 Hache, Corinne, 124 hallucination, 123–127, 129 Hamlet, 207, 303 He Jingzhi, 266, 274 heaven, 48, 57, 164, 281, 290–292 hedonism, 24, 29 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 11–12, 34–36, 92 Hegelianism, 34–35 Heidegger, Martin, 199 heteroglossia, 74–75 historical determinism, 11 homosocial world, 124 Hongren, 172 Houssaye, Arsène, 223 Hua quan, 171–172

327 Huadou, 300 Huaxia, 52, 291 Huang, Alexander C. Y., 174, 177–178 Huang Faguo (Huang Fa-kuo), 172–174 Huang Zuolin, 13, 116, 122, 129, 170, 177 Huiming, 172–173, 176 Huineng, 14, 51, 62, 82, 110, 172–174, 176, 210, 291, 299 human nature, 11, 25, 49, 52, 61, 64–65, 79, 87, 89, 92, 161, 165, 221, 292–293 humanism, 10, 48–49 hypothetical environment, 183, 185 Ibsen, Henrik, 202 ideology, 16, 37, 46, 52, 66, 76, 108, 255 illusionistic theater, 14, 172 image, 14, 50–51, 73, 75, 92, 94, 106, 116, 124–125, 128, 136–137, 142–143, 146, 148, 157, 182, 185, 188, 190, 192–193, 197–199, 209, 219–220, 223–226, 249, 254–255, 270, 284, 292, 298, 305 imaginary reality, 14, 172, 178 In an Instant, 301 In Search of Modern Theatre, 289, 294 individual truth, 17, 282 individualism, 109 ink paintings, 6, 9, 12, 147, 167, 185, 197–198, 234, 264, 302, 305 inlaying images, 15, 217–218, 220 Inner Eye, 161–162 Inner Landscape, The, 146, 166, 193 inner visions, 11, 14, 109, 146, 148–150, 166–167, 193

328

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

intermediate phase, 205 intertextual readings, 255 Ionesco, Eugène, 5, 234, 297–298 Iturbe, Xabier, 10, 19 Ivakhiv, Adrian J., 182, 185–187, 192–193 Jameson, Frederic, 249, 259 Janus, 218–219 Jesus Christ, 209 jiadingxing (suppositionality), 123, 129, 171, 183 Jiang Hanyang, 14, 169 Jiang Qing, 292, 300 Jintian, 19 Journey to the West, 75 joy of liberation, 137 Joyce, James, 31 juchangxing (theatricism), 171 Kafka, Franz, 70, 76, 293 Kafkaesque event, 56 Kant, Immanuel, 12, 24–27, 37, 45, 91 karma, 71–72 kinaesthetic and emotional processes, 191 kinaesthetic empathy, 191 Kuafu, 292 Kuo, Jason, 146, 148–149, 166, 193 L’Ascension, 151–152 L’Emerveillement, 152 “l’errance de l’oiseau” (Wanderings of the Bird), 235–237 L’Observation, 142–144, 151–152 L’Oeil de la nuit, 162–163 L’Oubli, 151–152 La Confusion, 151–152 La Porte du désir, 151–152

La Sérénité, 152 Łabędzka, Izabella, 94, 128 LaCapra, Dominick, 251, 255, 259–260 Lackner, Michael, 75, 80, 194, 258, 307 Laozi, 34, 51, 84, 94, 135 landscape, 11, 14, 143, 146, 148–149, 166, 185–186, 193–194 language, 2, 6, 9, 13, 15–16, 18, 23, 28–31, 33, 49–50, 70, 74, 77, 79, 86, 115–116, 119–123, 133, 137–139, 166, 171, 186, 190, 195–196, 205, 212, 219–220, 224–225, 233–234, 239, 250, 261, 264, 270, 273, 280, 282, 284–285, 291, 294, 297, 302–304 layer of images, 218 le théâtre holistique, 118 Lee, Edmund, 148, 166 Lee, Mabel, 1, 18–19, 41, 53, 66–67, 80, 82, 94–95, 128, 139–140, 156, 165, 167, 177, 192, 194, 199, 213–215, 226, 258, 286, 306–307 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 121–123, 129 Lei Feng, 58, 60, 66 leitmotif, 173 Li Zehou, 18, 178 libidinal desire, 250 Lieu du rêve, 151–152 Lim, Wah Guan, 15, 201, 215 linear progression, 13, 62 Liu Jianmei, 1, 13, 81 Liu Siyuan, 170, 177 Liu Zaifu, 10, 12, 14, 18–19, 43, 131, 178, 215, 224, 227, 289 Lolita, 303 Louie, Kam, 81, 94 lust, 37, 53, 89, 250–251, 292, 303

Index Malavia, Marcos, 124 Malraux, André, 11, 27, 33–34, 219, 226 Man Who Questions Death, The, 13, 19, 25, 27, 33, 36–37, 41–42, 52, 55–56, 58–59, 64, 66–67, 204, 206, 208–209, 224, 227, 293, 295, 297, 299 Maniglier, Patrice, 39 mannerisms, 100–101 Mao Zedong, 290 Marcuse, Herbert, 58, 60, 66 marginality, 36, 215 Marx, 11, 210 Marxism, 34, 37, 46 masculinity, 84, 86 masochistic act, 252 May, Theresa, 183 Mazzilli, Mary, 13, 82, 94, 115, 128–129 McConachie, Bruce, 181, 184, 191–192, 194 Mêditation, 151–152 Meditations on First Philosophy, 36 Mei Lanfang, 177 melancholia, 252–254, 257, 259 memory, 16, 31–32, 61–62, 90–91, 102, 121, 146, 233, 246, 258, 260, 291 mental images, 133, 142, 146, 150, 186, 197, 305 messiah, 210 metamorphosis, 12, 69, 79, 219 metaphysical flight, 249 Michelangelo, 206 mimesis, 121, 196 mindscape, 14, 146, 148, 151–152 minimalism, 169 Minima Moralia, 245, 258 Minuit, 145–146

329 mise-en-scène, 178, 202, 207–210, 212 misogyny, 82 modern ballad, 235 modern theatre, 177, 289, 294 modernity, 12, 52, 137, 222, 246 Mohammed, 210 monological voice, 75 montage, 124, 219, 269, 301 monumentalization, 197 mood, 106, 120, 143, 146, 154, 221, 245 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 206 Mukherjee, Binode Bihari, 162 multidimensional construct, 123 multiple scattered perspectives, 141–142 multivocality, 123–125 Munch, Edvard, 206 music drama, 174 musical-iconic languages, 170 museum, 14, 25, 27, 56, 59, 132–133, 140, 151, 167, 177, 206, 219, 222, 224, 226–227, 264, 297, 305 Mythe, 151–152 narrator, 16, 24–25, 28–29, 31–33, 61, 72, 76–77, 83, 86, 90–91, 107, 116, 232, 235, 247–250, 252–256, 259, 279–281, 283–284, 301 National Experimental Chorus, 175 National Theatre Movement, 170, 177 nationalism, 7, 267 naturalness, 169 nature, 11, 24, 28–29, 35, 37, 39, 47, 49, 52, 61, 64, 78–79, 87, 89, 91, 102, 110, 119–120, 122, 124, 141, 161, 170, 183–184, 190–192, 194, 213, 232–233, 235, 238, 252, 255, 259, 283–284, 292–293, 298

330

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

neutral actor, 8, 13, 15, 50, 99–101, 103–107, 109, 111–112, 204–205, 207, 214, 298 neutral mask, 100–102, 113 neutrality, 99–106, 108–109, 111, 129, 208 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 47–48, 57–59, 130, 210, 281, 286 nihilism, 10, 32, 51, 92, 221 no thoughts, 111 Nocturnal Wanderer, 47, 65, 204, 256, 295–296 Nora (character from Ibsen, A Doll’s House), 202 nonattachment, 13, 99–100, 109–112 nostalgia, 31, 34, 232 Ōe Kenzaburo, 36, 42 Of Mountains and Seas, 6, 52, 290–291 Omnipresence, 173 On Drama, 66–67, 113–114, 226, 290, 298 O’Neill, Eugene, 47 One Man’s Bible, 1, 7, 16, 18, 23–26, 28, 31–33, 41–42, 49, 52, 58, 61, 66, 89–90, 92, 94–95, 149, 161–162, 166–167, 232–233, 235, 245–246, 248–249, 252, 255–260, 290, 302, 304 open diaries, 17, 278 Ophelia (character from Shakespeare, Hamlet), 207 Other Shore, The, 6–7, 18–19, 67, 175, 202–205, 209–210, 213–214, 273, 294 painting, 1–2, 6, 9–10, 13–15, 17, 19, 44, 50–51, 70, 106, 122, 127,

painting (continued), 132–139, 141–144, 146, 148–150, 153–154, 157, 160, 166–167, 169, 171–172, 177, 186, 188, 190–191, 193–194, 196–198, 201, 205, 219, 223–224, 237, 264, 289, 299, 302, 305, 307, 341–342 Pan Shuyang, 17, 44, 277 panattachment, 111 pandetachment, 111 panoramic view, 289, 343 Paradox of Acting, The, 106, 113 parlando, 173 pastiche, 174 patriarchal injustice, 87 Pavis, Patrice, 170, 177 Peking Opera, 8, 107, 112, 170, 173–174, 176–177, 271–272, 274, 292, 299 Pelléas and Mélisande, 299, 307 Pensée noire, 148 performative pressure, 182, 184 performativity, 8, 13, 15, 30, 50, 52, 56, 83, 86, 99–100, 102–106, 109–112, 118, 122, 124, 170–171, 174–175, 177, 192–194, 196, 201–205, 207–210, 212–214, 218–219, 234, 236, 251, 253, 266, 271–272, 297–300, 303 pessimism, 65, 86 Pessoa, Fernando, 16, 277–280, 282–284, 286 philosophical aesthetics, 11–12, 21, 23, 26–27, 165 photographic image, 198 physicality, 125, 129 physiognomy, 157 plasticity, 171 Plato, 38, 45, 160 poetics, 31, 193, 199

Index poetry, 9–11, 15–17, 37, 44, 50–51, 53, 75, 131, 134, 138, 201, 204, 212, 217–219, 222–224, 226, 231, 234, 237, 239, 271, 289, 297, 302–303, 342 polymath, 11 polyphony, 75, 80, 188–189, 194, 258 poor theatre, 214 Portrait, 157–158, 194 postdramatic dramaturgy, 121, 123, 127, 129 postexile plays, 118–119, 121, 211 postmodernism, 251 pre-expressive level, 175 Preliminary Explorations in the Art of Modern Fiction, 211 presentational function, 170 primitive subconsciousness, 87 pronoun, 32, 208, 211, 296–298 Proust, Marcel, 31, 33 pseudo-perspective, 14, 143 psychological images, 13, 82, 107, 110, 296 psychological states, 132 puppetry, 103, 130 purification, 16, 73, 104, 252–253, 259 Quah, Sy Ren, 190, 194, 202–203, 213–214 Quatre quatuors pour un week-end, 7–8, 243 Quesnel, Alicia, 124 rationality, 27, 292–293 Ray, Satyajit, 162 rebirth, 220 Red Guard Movement, 3 redemption, 16, 210, 245–246, 248,

331 redemption (continued), 255, 259 reflective self, 16, 251 Regard intérieur, 160 Reifenscheid, Beate, 133, 140 renaissance, 10–12, 19, 43, 48, 50, 52–53, 75, 134, 206, 241–242, 244, 303–304, 342 reproduction, 149, 198 Requiem for Beauty, 9–10, 15–16, 30–31, 52–53, 201–202, 205, 207–210, 212–214, 217–224, 226, 231, 291, 303, 307 Rêve, 151–152 rhetoric, 177–178, 219 Rimbaud, Arthur, 38 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 262 Rodin, Auguste, 206, 209 Rojas, Carlos, 90, 94–95, 341, 345 Roland, Muriel, 124, 199 romanticism, 29, 290 Rose, Julie, 40, 42 rou, 82, 84 rounded characters, 202, 207 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 24, 232–233, 243 sadomasochistic desire, 250 Saint-Denis, Michel, 170 Sankey, Margaret, 242 Sans pensée, 151–152 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 12, 24, 47–48 scar literature, 304 scenic dramaturgy, 115, 118 scenography, 14, 169, 171, 176–178 sculpturality, 123, 171 “seeing poetry,” 15, 217–218 Segalen, Victor, 36, 42 self-effacement, 104 self-exile, 16, 283 self-referential nature, 122

332

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

self-salvation, 88, 90 self-transcendent observation, 14, 105, 143, 152 sensationalism, 17 sensory reality, 14, 172 sexual euphoric sensation, 64 sexuality, 160–161, 165, 258, 286 Shakespeare, William, 45, 74, 274 shaman, 77, 189, 293 shamanic chanting, 170 Shanghai People’s Art Theatre, 170 Shepherd, Simon, 202, 213 shifting-pronouns technique, 212 Shum, Janet, 16, 245 sideshow, 83, 86 signifier, 183 Silhouette/Shadow, 9, 167, 195, 199, 202, 206, 213–214, 231, 237–238, 269, 300–302, 307 simulacra, 226 simulation, 186, 226 sittlichkeit (ethical life), 92, 189, 291–292 Six Plays by Gao Xingjian, 7, 19 skepticism, 32, 65, 248 Snow in August, 8–9, 14, 82, 110, 114, 118, 169–170, 172–173, 176–178, 210, 215, 269, 271, 275, 291, 298–299 solidity, 171, 177 soliloquy, 72, 218, 239, 294, 296–297 solitary world, 146, 152, 166 Song Dynasty, 169 Song of the Night, 13, 19, 84, 94, 115–116, 118–122, 127–130, 167, 234–235, 297–298 Song Xiaoming, 258 Song Yongyi, 258 Sontag, Susan, 249, 253, 256, 259–260

Soul Mountain, 5–6, 12, 16, 18, 23, 25–26, 31, 41, 46, 48, 66, 69–70, 72, 74–75, 80–83, 87–89, 94–95, 149, 161–162, 166–167, 182, 211, 232–233, 235–236, 239–240, 243, 277–278, 283–286, 290–291, 293–294, 304 SourouS Company, 115–116, 124, 126, 128, 130 space, 14, 17, 50, 71, 73, 77, 90, 101, 106, 110, 116, 119, 122, 134, 136–138, 143, 148–149, 162, 171–172, 183, 185–186, 188–189, 191, 197–199, 206, 214, 219, 221–222, 226, 280, 283–284, 301 Spengler, Oswald, 33 Spinoza, Baruch, 12, 26, 35 spiritual resonance, 191 split subjectivity, 123–124, 126 spoken drama, 18, 174, 192–194, 203 spontaneity, 83, 169 Spoto, Estelle, 167 Stanislavski, Constantin, 171 stanza, 84, 190 Stars on a Cold Night, 3 state of Chan, 82, 170 stream of consciousness, 31 subjectivity, 14, 26, 83, 85–86, 88–90, 95, 108, 111, 123–126, 129, 141, 166, 283 supermen, 47–48, 58, 109 suppositional aesthetic, 184 suppositionality, 171, 183 surrealism, 29, 83, 290 Symposium, 160 synthesized soundscape, 183 Sze-Lorrain, Fiona, 15, 167, 195, 199, 214, 307 Tam, Kwok-kan, 14, 83, 87, 94, 141,

Index Tam, Kwok-kan (continued), 149, 166, 213–214 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 204 Tatlow, Antony, 246, 258 teleological intentionality, 63 textual lyricism, 120 Tey, Miriam, 10, 19 theatre, 4, 6, 8, 18, 52–53, 94–95, 113–114, 118, 124, 128–130, 170, 174, 177–178, 192–193, 213–214, 266, 271, 289, 294, 296–297, 300, 304 Théâtre de l’Épée de Bois, 124 theatricality, 99, 107, 113, 171, 176–178, 192, 219, 296 Thinker, The, 209 third eye, 15, 48, 74, 102, 104–106, 109, 111, 165, 207–208 third space, 110, 221 Tiananmen events, 295 Tolstoy, Leo, 45 total art, 51 total freedom, 10, 16, 29, 240 totalitarianism, 31, 233 Tractatus, 224, 227 Tranquility, 197 transcultural aesthetics, 129, 194 transformational creativity, 73 transmedia explorations, 11 trauma, 16, 95, 245–246, 249–251, 255–256, 258–260 trinity, 218, 220 tripartition, 15, 50, 94, 99–100, 195, 202–205, 212–214, 271, 302 Turine, Roger Pierre, 137, 140 Turner, Matthew, 191, 194 ultimate truth, 290 Un Clin d’oeil, 152 un spectacle de danse, 118

333 unbridled narcissism, 105 unconsciousness, 24 undulations of reverie, 223 Une Vision intérieure, 152 utilitarianism, 17 van Gogh, Vincent, 157, 159 vanishing point, 141–142 Venus, 206, 303 veracity, 187 Verfremdungseffekt, 209 verisimilar effect, 14, 172 visual performativity, 219 visualization, 154 Vol de l’esprit, 152 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 4 Wallis, Mick, 202, 213 wanderer, 47, 65, 136, 204, 235, 240, 256, 295–296 Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts, 9, 16, 214, 224, 226–227, 231, 233–234, 243, 303, 307 Wang, Eugene Y., 178 Wang Keming, 258 Wang Meng, 265, 274 wanton expression, 70 Weekend Quartet, 7, 204, 234, 295, 297–298 Wenders, Wim, 302 Wei Lingdun, 248, 259 Weightlessness, 223 Wild Man, 6, 15, 18, 182–184, 187–194, 202, 265, 293 wilderness, 183–185 “Wilted Chrysanthemums,” 6, 18 Without Isms, 7, 46, 66, 166, 284, 287 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 224–225, 227 World of Silence, The, 173

334

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

worldview, 189, 291 Wu Cheng’en, 74–75 wudai, 91–92 wu nian, 72 Wu Xingguo (Wu Hsing-kuo), 173–174, 176 Wu Zuguang, 177 Wynants, Jean-Marie, 137, 140

Yang Yongmiao, 215 Ye Furun (Yeh Fu-run), 172 Yeung, Jessica, 189–190, 193 Yip, Terry Siu-han, 83, 87, 94 youdai, 91 Yu Shangyuan, 170 Yu the Great, 292 Yue Huanyu, 15, 217

xieshi, 170 xieyi, 13–14, 116, 122, 169–172, 175–176 xiqu, 174, 183, 188 Xu, Gary Gang, 87, 95 Xu Shuya, 8, 173–174, 178, 269, 272, 274, 299, 307

Zarader, Jean-Pierre, 11, 23, 44–45, 51, 295, 306 zero time, 13, 62 Zhang Xianliang, 167 Zhao, Henry Yiheng, 86, 89, 94–95, 129, 177, 201, 213 Zheng Xie, 169–170, 176 Zhou Meihui (Chou Mei-huei), 177 Zhuangzi, 11, 85, 91–92, 293 Zong Baihua, 171, 177

Yan Haiping, 183, 192 Yang Xiaobin, 246, 258

About the Contributors

Michael Berry is professor of Asian languages and cultures at UCLA. He is the author of A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008), Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2006), and Jia Zhang-ke’s Hometown Trilogy (2009). His most recent publication is a full-length Chinese-language interview book with film director Hou Hsiao-hsien entitled Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiaohsien’s Memories of Shadows and Light (2014). Berry is also translator of several Chinese novels and co-editor of Divided Lenses (2016) and Modernism Revisited (2016). Shelby Chan is associate professor of translation at Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong. She holds a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is the author of Identity and Theatre Translation in Hong Kong (2015) and co-editor of Hong Kong Drama Review: Special Issue on Gao Xingjian (2009). She has contributed extensively, in both English and Chinese, to books, journals, and conferences on theater, translation, and interpreting studies. She has also rendered four plays from English into Cantonese for stage performances in Hong Kong. Currently, she is translating Gao Xingjian and Gilbert Fong’s monograph On Drama (2009; in Chinese) into English. Stephen Conlon is the former dean of the Graduate School of English at Assumption University, Thailand. A PhD graduate from the Department of English at the University of Sydney, his publications include Underground Streams: A Journal of Voyages in Reading, Writing, Teaching and Music (2004), A Fate Worse than Death: Students and Teachers Dialogues on Suicide (2007), Great Souls: Socrates, Jesus, Confucius, Lao Tzu and the Buddha as Teachers (2008), Chaos in the Classroom (2009), and The Heroic Student: A Reading of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (2010). He is the founding editor of Asian Journal of Literature, Culture and Society.

336

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Noël Dutrait is emeritus professor of Chinese language and literature and director of the Asian Research Institute at Aix Marseille University. He has published extensively on modern and contemporary Chinese authors and, until her death in 2010, he collaborated with his wife, Liliane, to produce French editions of the works of numerous important contemporary Chinese authors. Two of these authors later became Nobel laureates: Gao Xingjian in 2000 and Mo Yan in 2012. Noël and Liliane Dutrait have produced French translations of most of Gao Xingjian’s major works of fiction, theater, and criticism. Megan Evans is senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Her research interests include contemporary innovation in Chinese musical drama or xiqu performance, intercultural performance practices in directing and actor training, and physical theater methodologies. She has published in Modern Chinese Language and Culture Web Publication Series, Asian Theatre Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Research International, and New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies. She directed and produced Gao Xingjian’s Wild Man to high critical acclaim. Gilbert Fong is provost and professor of translation at Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong. He received a PhD from the University of Toronto. Afterward, he taught at the University of Toronto and York University in Canada, and was professor–reader of translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. An acclaimed translator, he has translated into English many plays by Gao Xingjian: The Other Shore (1999), Snow in August (2004), Cold Literature: Selected Works by Gao Xingjian (with Mabel Lee; 2005), Escape and The Man Who Questions Death (2007), Of Mountains and Seas (2008), City of the Dead and Song of the Night (with Mabel Lee, 2015) and Wild Man (forthcoming 2018). He is the author of On Drama (with Gao Xingjian; in Chinese) (2009) and the editor of Dubbing and Subtitling in a World Context (2010), as well as several books on theater, translation studies, and Chinese literature. Ming Jian is professor of Chinese and Asian studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures and the Asian Studies Program at William

About the Contributors

337

Paterson University of New Jersey. His research spans Chinese literature and cinema as well as German literature, and he has recently published studies on Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain and Tang frontier poetry. His major publications include Chinese translations from German, such as Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Theoretical Aesthetics (1987), and Marianne Weber’s Max Weber: A Biography (2014). Jiang Hanyang received his MPhil degree from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2017 and is now a PhD student majoring in theatre studies at the University of British Columbia. His current research concerns the Sinification of the Stanislavsky System in Socialist China. He also has a scholarly interest in the narratology of modern Chinese fiction, especially that of Jin Yucheng’s novel Fanhua and Wang Zengqi’s short stories. Mabel Lee, PhD, FAHA, is currently an adjunct professor of Chinese studies at the University of Sydney, where she taught twentieth-century Chinese history and literature from 1966 to 2000. In the period 1995– 2000 her courses included the study of Gao Xingjian. She has published numerous essays about Gao Xingjian as well as English editions of his works: two novels, Soul Mountain (2000) and One Man’s Bible (2002); a short story collection, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (2004); and two collections of criticism, The Case for Literature (2006/2007) and Aesthetics and Creation (2012). An honorary professor for a number of years at the Open University of Hong Kong, she was also recently appointed a distinguished professor in their major research project titled “Chinese Culture in the Global Context.” Wah Guan Lim, BA Hons 1 (UNSW), MSt (Oxon), MA (Princeton), PhD (Cornell), is an assistant professor of Chinese at Bard College, New York. A scholar of transnational Chinese literature and performance, he researches the social, political, and artistic implications of theater and performance in a comparative framework across the stages of Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and Singapore. He is currently completing his book

338

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

manuscript tentatively titled “Denationalizing Identities: The Politics of Performance in the Chinese Diaspora.” Liu Jianmei holds a PhD from Columbia University and is currently professor of Chinese literature at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is the author of numerous path-breaking monographs, including Zhuangzi and Modern Chinese Literature (2016) and Revolution Plus Love: Literary History, Women’s Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (2003), and coeditor of The Jin Yong Phenomenon: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and Modern Chinese Literary History (2007). Her areas of interest are modern and contemporary Chinese literature, gender studies, the relationship between philosophy and literature, and film studies. Liu Zaifu is an outspoken public intellectual who rose to prominence in China during the early 1980s. A former director of the Institute of Literature at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, since the 1990s he has held academic appointments in major universities in the United States, Europe, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. His huge publications list in Chinese includes Reflections on Literature (1986), Farewell to Gods (1994), On Gao Xingjian (2000), Four Books on the Dream of the Red Chamber (2006), and A Brief Outline of Li Zehou’s Aesthetics (2009). His English publications include Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber (2008) and A Study of Two Classics (2012). Mary Mazzilli is lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. She has held academic appointments in theater and performance studies at the University of London and Technological University in Singapore. She received her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies in Chinese studies and comparative literature. Her major publications include her co-edited volume Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and the Ethics of Failure (2014). Her book Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre (2016) has received highly favorable reviews.

About the Contributors

339

Pan Shuyang received her MPhil from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2016, and is now a PhD student majoring in Chinese and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interest is modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, and culture, especially the interaction between Chinese intellectual history and the trends and developments in poetry and the novel in modern and contemporary times. She has published essays in Chinese literary magazines including Huawen wenxue, Ming pao Monthly, Shucheng, and Shuwu. Julie Rose has been honored as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des arts et des lettres for her many translations from French. Her major works include the first unabridged English version of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (2008) and, in contemporary French philosophical and political inquiry, translations of the urbanist-theorist Paul Virilio, the political philosopher Jacques Rancière, the sociologist-philosopher Bruno Latour, the art and architecture critic Hubert Damisch, and books, essays, and articles by theorists such as Georges Teyssot and Roland Barthes. Her translation of a biography by Belgian writer Philippe Paquet of Simon Leys, Simon Leys: Navigating Between Two Worlds, was published in 2017. Margaret Sankey is professor emerita in French studies at the University of Sydney and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She specializes in French literature and cultural history, with French scientific voyages to Australia the focus of her research. Her translations include Gilbert Durand’s Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire and Michel Serres’s Les cinq sens, and she is translating a work on Terra australis by the seventeenth-century French abbé Jean Paulmier. She has been honored as Officier de l’ordre des Palmes académiques and chevalier de l’ordre national du Mérite. Janet Shum graduated in 2010 with a PhD from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Published in Chinese, her dissertation, “Language in Exile” (2014), explores Gao Xingjian’s diasporic aesthetic, examining how the ideas of time, space, homeliness, and unhomeliness—

340

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

pivotal to exile literature—are constituted in his writings. Her research covers literature, cultural criticism, critical theory, and gender studies, and she is currently exploring how Gao Xingjian infuses Chan Buddhist aesthetics into his works. She is a cultural commentator for the local Hong Kong media and a freelance contributor to local newspapers and journals. Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet and musician who lives in France and works in many areas of the creative and performing arts. Her latest book, The Ruined Elegance (2016), published in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, was listed in Best Books in Poetry for 2015 by The Library Journal and was finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She has translated several books of works by contemporary Chinese, American, and French poets, and most recently Chinese woman poet and scenographer Yi Lu’s Sea Summit (2016), which was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in Poetry. She was the editor of Gao Xingjian’s Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian (2007), and her interview “Cinema, Too, Is Literature: Conversing with Gao Xingjian” was published in the archives of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center (2008). Kwok-kan Tam is chair professor and dean-designate of Humanities and Social Science at Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong. He is also the current head of the International Ibsen Committee of the Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo. His major publications include Politics of the Subject in Modern Chinese Literature (2000), Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian (2001), Ibsen in China: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Translation and Performance (2001), English and Globalization: Perspectives from Hong Kong and Mainland China (2004), Ibsen and the Modern Self (2010), and Culture in Translation: Reception of Chinese Literature in Comparative Perspective (2012). Yue Huanyu was born in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. He graduated with a major in literature from East China Normal University in Shanghai and is now enrolled as an MPhil candidate at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research concerns the literary history of

About the Contributors

341

late Qing and Republican China, especially anecdotes, and he is currently conducting a project to bring attention to Chinese anecdotes that highlight the mutually transformative power of modern and classical literary texts. He also has a scholarly interest in cross-cultural comparative studies in film and media, especially East Asian film and animation. Jean-Pierre Zarader is a philosopher and historian of philosophy. He specializes in Malraux’s writings on art, notably their connections with contemporary philosophy. His major works include Petite histoire des idées philosophiques (1994), Malraux ou la pensée de l’art (1996), Philosophie et cinéma (1997), Robinson philosophe: Vendredi ou la vie sauvage de Michel Tournier (1999), and André Malraux Les Écrits sur l’art (2013). He has participated in the compilation of important reference works, including Dictionnaire de la pensée du cinéma (2012) and Dictionnaire Malraux (2015). His most recent work is Malraux Dictionnaire de l’imaginaire (Paris: Klincksieck, Les Belles Lettres, 2017).

Praise for Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

“No modern figure writing in Chinese better epitomizes the notion of global author than Gao Xingjian, a creative voice whose courage and ingenuity are indelibly imprinted on world literature. This new collection testifies to the enduring effect Gao has on scholars the world over. Interdisciplinary in scope, Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics investigates issues as far-flung as the philosophical implications of his work, his engagement with issues of gender, his religious inquiries, and his artistic creativity. Gao Xingjian’s restless intellect has driven him to delve into novel writing, criticism, drama, ink painting, and even cinema, and all these various dimensions are addressed in this compendium. Complete with an interview of the author, the broad range of subjects and intellectual approaches ensures this book will be of great interest to modern scholars of Chinese and comparative literature as well as those studying Gao Xingjian for generations to come.” —Christopher Lupke, Professor and Chair, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Alberta *** “This exuberantly interdisciplinary volume examines Gao Xingjian’s eclectic oeuvre from a variety of different perspectives, ranging from the aesthetic to the philosophical.” —Carlos Rojas, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University

344

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics *** “This collection offers a valuable mixture of critical appreciations and scholarly essays dealing with the work of Gao Xingjian, the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature. By focusing on ways in which Gao’s aesthetic theory and practice reach across a range of different artistic media, and also into areas of philosophy, Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics adds significantly to our knowledge of Gao’s oeuvre in all its complexity.” —Michel Hockx, Professor of Chinese Literature and Director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, University of Notre Dame *** “Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics provides insightful and elaborate elucidations of Gao’s already well-studied works (his famous avant-garde theatrical experiments in the post-Mao 1980s, and his representative works after the 1990s), the lesser-known aspects of Gao’s aesthetic oeuvres (in particular, the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings), as well as his illustrating and illuminating reconfiguration of self-world in the cutting-edge fields of trans-genre, trans-media, trans-discipline, and transculture. Located at the nexus of literary scrutiny, philosophical investigation, (auto)biographical approach, interdisciplinary study, and multimedia interpretation, this fascinating, comprehensive, and important volume about Gao Xingjian, a Nobel Laureate and present-day Renaissance Man, forcefully presents the multilayered dimensions of Gao’s diversified, contested, and connected literary and artistic world, and impressively covers a great range of different genres and styles from dramatic creations to fictional representations, ink painting to dance and music, and art exhibitions to cinematic poetry.” —Weijie Song, Associate Professor of Chinese Literature, Rutgers University

345 *** “This is one of the most comprehensive studies of Gao Xingjian’s works. The unique strength of this book lies in the variety of expertise and the wide range of disciplinary approaches that the authors bring to the study of Gao, the playwright, the novelist, the poet, the painter, and the philosopher. Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics provides a panoramic view on Gao Xingjian’s many talents through a well-orchestrated effort to examine the transmedia aesthetics that connect these talents. This book will be an essential resource for readers seeking to understand Gao Xingjian, one of the most important contemporary writers, as well as the questions that his writings, paintings, and experimental media works have pointed to, relating tradition to the contemporary world, identity to representational modes, and self to philosophical reflections.” —Mingwei Song, Associate Professor of Chinese, Wellesley College

Cambria Sinophone World Series General Editor: Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania) The members of the editorial board are: • Michael Berry (UCLA) • Wendy Larson (University of Oregon) • Jianmei Liu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) • Christopher Lupke (University of Alberta) • Haun Saussy (University of Chicago) • Carlos Rojas (Duke University) • Tansen Sen (NYU Shanghai) • Shu-mei Shih (UCLA) • Jing Tsu (Yale University) • David Der-wei Wang (Harvard University)

Books in the Cambria Sinophone World Series Texts and Transformations edited by Haun Saussy Chinese Women Writers and Modern Print Culture by Megan M. Ferry Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung by Carolyn T. Brown Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics edited by Mabel Lee and Liu Jianmei Imperfect Understanding: Intimate Portraits of Chinese Celebrities edited by Christopher Rea Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture by Wendy Larson The Borderlands of Asia: Culture, Place, Poetry by Mark Bender

348

Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

Buddhist Transformations and Interactions: Essays in Honor of Antonino Forte edited by Victor H. Mair Chinese Avant-garde Fiction: Quest for Historicity and Transcendent Truth by Zhansui Yu Eroticism and Other Literary Conventions in Chinese Literature: Intertextuality In The Story Of The Stone by I-Hsien Wu The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice and Motion by Christopher Lupke Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond by Chia-rong Wu Cosmopolitanism in China edited by Minghui Hu and Johan Elverskog The Immortal Maiden Equal to Heaven and Other Precious Scrolls from Western Gansu by Wilt L. Idema Chinese Ethnic Minority Oral Traditions: A Recovered Text of Bai Folk Songs in a Sinoxenic Script by Jingqi Fu and Zhao Min with Xu Lin and Duan Ling China and Beyond in the Mediaeval Period: Cultural Crossings and Inter-Regional Connections edited by Dorothy C. Wong and Gustav Heldt Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations by Karen An-hwei Lee Modern Poetry in China: A Visual-Verbal Dynamic by Paul Manfredi Sinophone Malaysian Literature: Not Made in China by Alison M. Groppe Infected Korean Language, Purity versus Hybridity: From the Sinographic Cosmopolis to Japanese Colonialism to Global English by Koh Jongsok (translated by Ross King) The Chinese Prose Poem: A Study of Lu Xun’s Wild Grass (Yecao)  by Nicholas A. Kaldis Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation by Gao Xingjian (translated by Mabel Lee) Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World by E. K. Tan

Cambria Sinophone World Series

349

A Study of Two Classics: A Cultural Critique of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin by Liu Zaifu (translated by Shu Yunzhong) Confucian Prophet: Political Thought in Du Fu’s Poetry (752–757) by David K. Schneider The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context: A Textual Archaeology of the Yi jing by Scott Davis